Canada’s ‘V-Chip’ Test Pairs Broadcasters, Gut Instincts

As American television magnates prepare to enter a new world by fashioning a movie-style rating system for broadcast and cable programming, they might take a few clues from Linda Leslie, who has arrived there ahead of them.

Leslie, 42, a manager with a university degree in education and 14 years’ experience at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., has been in charge of assigning “V-chip” ratings to shows on this country’s largest network for more than a month. The CBC is one of 11 broadcasters participating in the Canadian test of the V-chip, the device that lets parents blank out TV programs because of violence, sex and foul language.

Leslie faced her first major dilemma a few weeks ago with the rebroadcast of the acclaimed but controversial miniseries “The Boys of St. Vincent,” an unflinching, fact-based dramatization of physical and sexual abuse in a Roman Catholic orphanage in Newfoundland. It sent her prowling through the clutter of offices in the CBC’s Toronto production center, asking co-workers for advice.

While not explicitly depicting beatings and molestations, the four-hour program contains brief shots of naked boys in a shower and harrowing scenes of children pursued by Christian Brothers. In sum, it is just the kind of hard-hitting, adult drama that V-chip critics fear will be driven off the air by efforts to curtail violence and sex on television.

“ ‘The Boys of St. Vincent’ I had a hard time deciding on,” said Leslie, whose unease was compounded because the miniseries ran in two parts from 8 to 10 p.m., a relatively early time slot. “I kept asking people, ‘Would you feel comfortable watching this with your 14-year-old? Your 11-year-old?’

“In the end, I thought children under 16 would have trouble with it,” she concluded. Leslie assigned “The Boys of St. Vincent” the equivalent of an American movie R-rating--not recommended for children 16 and younger without parental accompaniment.

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The episode illustrates the gut-instinct nature of decision-making among the 20 or so TV executives rating programs for the current Canadian V-chip test.

But the agonizing Leslie went through over the miniseries is rare. Armed with explicit guidelines issued by Canada’s cable television industry, most participating broadcasters have found the ratings self-evident for most programs. They’ve found it unnecessary, for example, to view every program before it airs. Stations are almost always rating all episodes of a series the same, week in and week out.

“Once you’ve seen ‘All My Children’ a half-dozen times, you pretty much know what’s coming up,” Leslie said. “If I had to watch everything on the schedule, it would take a horrendous number of hours.”

Overall, in fact, the Canadian experience so far has indicated that rating TV shows is less difficult and time-consuming than some American broadcasters have warned.

Dave Reid, general manager of station KVOS in Bellingham, Wash., a border station that draws 70% of its viewers from the Vancouver region and is one of two American broadcasters participating in the Canadian test, observed: “The rating process is something that doesn’t take a lot of time. . . . We see the V-chip as beneficial to our viewers, not at all unmanageable for the station and something that’s not going to change the programming.”

But there still are unanswered questions. With just 130 families in the current test, there is no way to measure the impact on Nielsen rankings or advertisers. It’s unknown, for instance, how many sets blanked out “The Boys of St. Vincent” because of its V-chip rating, or whether viewers even agreed with the judgment that gave it a more restrictive rating than a neighboring channel assigned to the celebrations of libido on “Melrose Place.”

Some of those answers might emerge when the test ends in May and participating viewers are debriefed. The rating system then will probably be adjusted or revamped.

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U.S. television executives had resisted a rating system for decades, suggesting that it would be too difficult, too complex and objectionable on First Amendment grounds. But the industry has reluctantly acquiesced under pressure from the U.S. Congress, which enacted a law signed by President Clinton that mandates use of the V-chip and proposes a voluntary rating system if the industry doesn’t come up with one if its own.

U.S. networks have promised to have a V-chip rating system ready by January, but tests have been going on in Canada for almost a year. Government regulators here have ordered a fully operational system in place by September.

In what is the most extensive tryout of the V-chip to date, 130 cable television families in five cities--Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Victoria and Calgary--volunteered to have the device installed in their home converter boxes; 11 broadcasters have agreed to encode rating information in at least some of their programs so the chip can read and react to it.

Raters work from guidelines written by Alison Clayton, an Ottawa-based consultant, for Rogers Communications and Shaw Communications, Canada’s two largest cable TV companies. Shows are rated in four categories--an overall theatrical style rating as well as separate ratings for violence, language and sexual material on a scale of 0 to 5.

“ER,” the hospital drama hugely popular in Canada and the United States, was judged mild in all four categories and given a V-chip rating of 2 across the board by the committee of in-house reviewers at CTV, Canada’s privately owned national television network.

“Roseanne” was rated 2 (parental guidance) for content, 1 for violence, 1 for language and 1 for sexual material by the same committee. KVOS in Bellingham rates its nightly reruns of “Seinfeld” at 2, 0, 0, 1, although it bumped up the rating on sex from 1 to 2 for the famous episode on masturbation.

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The ratings are encoded in the programs in a process similar to that used for closed captioning. The V-chip in the converter box reads the coding and produces a blank screen when instructed.

Thus, a parent who sets the V-chip at 2 for violence will block viewing of any program with a rating of 3 or above in that category. The V-chip can be deactivated after children are in bed.

News, public affairs and sports are exempt from program ratings, although that leaves out what is arguably the bloodiest program on Canadian television: Hockey Night in Canada, a weekly doubleheader with the brawling sportsmen of the NHL.

Interviews with several program executives who do the judging turned up inconsistencies--the same shows sometimes receive marginally different ratings from one channel to the next--and few examples of restrictive ratings for violence among network series.

The highest rating for violence given to a television series was 4 for “Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years,” a Canadian-made Western that airs at 10 p.m. on CTV and is syndicated in the United States. “Due South,” an action comedy filmed in Toronto and broadcast by CBS in the U.S. and by CTV here, was criticized for its violence in a recent study by the UCLA Center for Communication Policy. But it has been rated only a 2.

One reason Canada is ahead of the U.S. on V-chip development is that the device was developed by a Canadian, Tim Collings, a professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. Another is that the V-chip has been pushed relentlessly for four years by government officials, led by Keith Spicer, the top regulator of the cable TV industry, as a way to protect children against broadcast violence.

Canadian broadcasters, smaller and less politically influential than their U.S. counterparts, have been more supportive of the V-chip than has the American industry. The cable companies here, under fire for raising consumer rates, have eagerly promoted the device.

A major concern of Canadian TV executives is that both countries settle on a common or closely compatible program rating system. To do otherwise risks further confusing the millions of viewers in both nations that live along the border and receive both Canadian and American channels, they say.

Some U.S. broadcasters regard the Canadian system as too complex and favor a simplified rating system with fewer categories. Broadcast officials from both countries are scheduled to meet on the issue Tuesday in Washington.

Meanwhile, amid the mainly upbeat assessments of the V-chip test here, there are some dissenting voices.

Even regulatory czar Spicer cautions that it is no panacea. “We don’t see the V-chip as a magic solution,” he said in an interview. But he said that, ultimately, society must make explicit television violence aimed at young children “as socially unacceptable as drunk driving or spreading pollution.”

Leslie agrees that the wonders of the V-chip can be oversold.

“There seems to be an ever-growing feeling that television is responsible for a lot of the evils in society, and I don’t truly believe that,” she said. “If there were a stronger sense of family and a stronger sense of community, TV violence wouldn’t be an issue. . . .

“Probably the parents who will use the V-chip are those who are already trying very hard to monitor what their children watch and probably doing a pretty good job of it.”