The Final Battle Will Be Televised

The bookends of Jack Valenti’s public life sit as paired photos atop his office bureau in downtown Washington. In one he is a peripheral figure at a momentous event--a 42-year-old Houston ad man who, just hours earlier, was part of the ill-fated presidential motorcade through Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, his position there a perk of his duties for the Kennedy-Johnson campaign. * After the gunfire, after the chaos that consumed the streets, Valenti had talked a deputy sheriff into whisking him and a Kennedy secretary to Parkland Memorial Hospital. The LBJ aide who later summoned Valenti to board Air Force One was the same one to tell him, softly, but only after the vice president’s order was relayed, that President John F. Kennedy was dead.

In the photo, Valenti is aboard the plane at Love Field. Minutes earlier, he had been on the phone with Justice Department officials, double-checking the wording of the presidential oath of office. Now he was crouched against the side of the main cabin, watching Lyndon Baines Johnson take that oath, noticing, too, the blood and brain matter splattered on the first lady’s pink suit. When Air Force One took off, Valenti stayed aboard at the request of LBJ, leaving his Houston advertising agency behind and joining the new president’s inner circle.

The companion photo, taken more than three decades later, lacks the Sturm und Drang of the first. But this time Valenti is front and center, a white-

haired general ready to command a contentious cultural war he hopes will crown his long Washington career. He is standing next to a president 25 years his junior, to whom he has just given a what-for about governmental threats to free expression, and President Bill Clinton is announcing that the television industry has “voluntarily” agreed to warn parents about mature content in its programming.

In truth Valenti, veteran president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, a trade group for the Hollywood studios, was there that day at the White House to defend business interests. But Valenti wouldn’t be Valenti (“the greatest politician” in America, former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo asserted six years ago) if he let free expression be defined in such crass commercial terms. On the morning this photo was shot, Valenti took his place on the East Room rostrum--Clinton on his right, Vice President Al Gore on his left, the biggest executives (and egos) in the networks, cable and studios assembled around the room--and spoke not of dollars but of the First Amendment, creative expression and the moral underpinnings of faith and family.

“I pointed out to the president that we had to understand one irretrievable truth and it is this: That unless you instill and insert within a child a moral shield that will be impenetrable when that child goes out the front door into the mean streets, that will allow the child to resist the blandishments of his peers . . . if that child doesn’t understand God’s commandments, what is right and what is plainly wrong, no electronic device, no law, no meeting in the White House, no avalanche of speeches in the House and Senate is going to salvage that child’s conduct or locate the loss of moral core.

“If we understand that, Mr. President, then we’ll be about our business.”

*

THE WASHINGTON/HOLLYWOOD COGNOSCENTI ASSUMED THAT VALENTI, who turned 75 in September, would retire last year when his million-dollar-a-year contract at MPAA came up for renewal. Despite suffering setbacks in fully opening European and Chinese markets to Hollywood, Valenti could hang his hat on a long career that included designing the G-PG-R movie rating system, opening other foreign markets for American movies and keeping the networks’ hands off hundreds of millions of TV rerun dollars jealously guarded by his production studios.

Valenti has become such a legendary figure it’s easy to forget he’s just a trade association president. When National Public Radio noted Valenti’s 75th birthday, he was referred to simply as “Jack Valenti.” No title, no job description--as if he were a popular movie star from Hollywood’s Golden Age, not a Washington lobbyist (a label, by the way, that he refuses to apply to himself).

When Valenti left the Johnson White House in 1966 to take over the MPAA, there was no mistaking his position as an underling to the studio bosses who employed him. Not even his invitations to the Palm Springs home of Hollywood’s most powerful figure, MCA chief Lew Wasserman, could disguise those lines of authority. But 30 years later, Wasserman and his peers are fading into the background, and Valenti is at the peak of his power--his reputation towering over most of the younger generation of studio bosses in Hollywood. “I’d be flattered to think of myself as a peer of Jack Valenti,” says MCA President Ron Meyer.

Valenti has become an established player in the country’s jet stream of financial and political power. He golfs with financier Warren Buffet, is a regular at investment banker Herb Allen’s CEO-level annual Sun Valley retreat and celebrates his birthday at a Deauville chteau with U.S. Ambassador to France Pamela Harriman and high-ranking French government officials.

The insiders were wrong about Valenti’s desire to trade in his Lucchese cowboy boots for beach thongs. Last fall, he ended his talks with CNN about hosting the political show “Crossfire” and instead signed a new contract with the eight studio chiefs who make up the MPAA. The agreement was “evergreen,” a permanent contract that gave either side an option to terminate with one year’s notice.

Then came the real shocker: In January, at the prodding of entertainment industry executives, he agreed to lead the broadcasters, cable systems and production studios in a bid to design a voluntary ratings system for TV programs--much like the one used for movies--that they hoped would keep Congress and the Federal Communications Commission off their backs. “I have to say I have more fun when the water is up to my neck than when I’m sitting on a beach chair,” Valenti says. “I do enjoy the rousing sounds of battle.”

What an opportunity to cap an impressive career. If Act I was the landmark movie ratings system that assuaged parents while enabling filmmakers to push creative boundaries, the TV ratings system he promises to deliver to the White House early next year could be Act II in the Valenti legacy: Jack Valenti empowering parents! Jack Valenti protecting the First Amendment! Jack Valenti defending the “art” of Hollywood’s “creative” community!

There’s only one problem: Valenti is leading a no-win war.

This time he can’t gain ground by delivering money and celebrities to members of Congress, or wooing legislators with his famously exclusive private screenings at the MPAA offices or intimate fund-raisers at his Washington home, or even pulling an eleventh-hour ally out of the hat to block an FCC move or pass a piece of legislation.

This time, as Valenti is learning, he is at the center of a cultural tornado of mammoth proportions, a magnet for all those researchers who’ve spent years documenting the harmful effects on children of too much TV violence, for all those educators and religious leaders who see their teachings undermined daily by “Beavis and Butt-head” and all its permutations, for all those parents futilely piling sandbags at the front door to keep the onslaught of a coarsening pop culture at bay.

It is Valenti’s most difficult war. “This one is fraught with peril,” he concedes, “because it is highly populated with diverse groups within the industry and without. I never knew there were so many people with a design for a TV program rating before.”

Valenti, who has an all-consuming passion for the art of politics and a preacher’s theatrics, knows how to couch his industry’s issues as national interest--or at least as wholesomely American as Jimmy Stewart. That wasn’t so difficult when he was opening markets for American movies or seeking overseas copyright protections for Hollywood. He even managed to do it when the networks wanted some of the hundreds of millions of TV rerun dollars then flowing to Hollywood production studios. Valenti successfully painted the networks as a big, bad monopoly trying to squeeze out the small, independent creative forces (those producers who, as one network lobbyist snarled, “could only afford a $100,000 Mercedes every other year, instead of every year”).

It will be a challenge for Valenti to portray himself on the side of the angels as the TV ratings battle wears on. When Valenti says, as he often does, that if America darkened all its theaters and turned off all the TV sets, there’d be little change in violence rates, he’s coming dangerously close to sounding like a tobacco lobbyist who claims that smoking has nothing to do with cancer. “Jack gets paid to say this,” says Dr. Robert T. M. Phillips, deputy medical director of the American Psychiatric Assn. “But he’s talking through his hat.”

*

THESE HEATED CULTURAL CROSSCURRENTS WERE SET OFF BY COOL technology. A television set receives programs broadcast across up to 535 lines of information on its screen. In the early 1990s, while following Congress’ directive to equip TV sets for closed captioning to aid the hearing-impaired, engineers realized that there was room left over on the 21st screen line to air more information about programs. With alarms ringing about the effects of media violence on children, members of Congress seized on this technological potential--seeing in it a way to broadcast warnings to parents, who then could use their remote controls to block out those shows. Thus was born the slightly misnamed “V-chip” (V for violence, but there is no actual chip).

Liberal forces concerned about violence found strong allies in conservative, often religious, groups worried about sexual references and coarse language on TV programming. Political candidates of both parties bemoaned Hollywood’s culture of depravity. Demands for V-chip technology and a ratings system to guide parents in blocking shows steamrolled through the halls of Congress. On Feb. 8, Clinton signed a law mandating that blocking technology be installed on most TV sets sold in America. The law gives the industry a year to devise an adequate ratings system. Otherwise, the FCC will step in.

Valenti could have sat out this battle. While his studio members produce many of the shows that would be rated, those industries that distribute TV shows--the networks and cable channels--have far more at stake. In past conflicts, Valenti may have denounced TV as a “pathological nanny” and the cable industry a “viral contagion,” but he quickly emerged as the logical choice for his former opponents. “We needed someone of national stature,” says Edward O. Fritts, president of the National Assn. of Broadcasters. Not only had Valenti designed the MPAA ratings system, but he was also the most objective figure around.

Already, the industry was breaking into squabbling factions. By the time the legislation passed, cable systems were angling to gain an added competitive advantage over the networks. Likewise, public broadcasting wanted a moniker recommending its educational programming. The networks, struggling under declining market shares, worried about lost advertising revenue. While NBC and CBS were threatening to challenge the law in court, ABC and Fox considered devising their own ratings.

“It’s a mutually antagonistic, factious industry where everybody wakes up hoping everybody else has failed the night before,” says Valenti. “There is suspicion among each of these people.” There was the real danger that no single, unified ratings system would emerge, tempting FCC bureaucrats to step in.

It didn’t take much prodding for Valenti to step into his general’s tank and pull up to the front lines, all the while paraphrasing Marshal Ferdinand Foch, French leader of the unified forces during World War I: “My left is collapsing, my right cannot hold and my center is under furious assault. Therefore I shall attack.”

Not all of his own members were eager for their high-paid Washington rep to spend his time and prestige on a television ratings system. But with industry lines blurring--Disney owns a cable station, for example, while Fox is both a studio and a network--MPAA members believed that their stakes in the battle were big enough to lend Valenti to the effort.

He pulled together these warring factions in time for a Feb. 29 meeting at the White House. But, as a former opponent of the V-chip and TV ratings, Valenti portrays himself as the reluctant warrior. “Twenty-five hundred years ago, Pythagoras, mathematician and philosopher, founded a religion in which the main tenet was the sinfulness of eating beans,” he told California’s broadcasters last July. “In these more modern times a few politicians have founded a new tribal rite which consists of publicly denouncing television as one of the prime causes of decay in the moral structure of society. [Both theories] are equally fascinating and equally off-center.

“A TV program rating system is not the societal equivalent of the Salk vaccine,” he added. “Program ratings will not turn the mean streets into tranquil gardens. Helping parents guide the TV watching of their very young children is one small step.”

As Valenti stressed to the president and vice president in February, drawing up a TV ratings system will be an industry-only effort. But that is certain to draw an avalanche of public criticism.

The MPAA movie ratings system uses non-industry, anonymous parents to categorize the nearly 400 films Hollywood produces each year. Industry officials serve on an appeals board. But the TV ratings system will be solely industry-run, with networks and cable channels rating their own shows. Valenti insists that with 2,000 hours of programming a day, self-rating is the only choice.

A three-person executive committee--chaired by Valenti and composed of Fritts of the National Assn. of Broadcasters and Decker Anstrom, president of the National Cable Television Assn.--meets behind closed doors to design that TV ratings system. They are part of a 25-member implementation committee that is primarily composed of industry officials but also includes Hollywood’s creative guilds. The medical community, educators, religious groups and parental groups are consulted, but none sit at the design table.

The main point of contention is whether and how much content of a show should be described. Is it enough to rate a suggestive “Friends” episode the equivalent of PG-13 or should NBC be required to state that it is “sexually explicit”? Should “NYPD Blue” get an age rating or the added designation of a “violent” show?

A number of powerful TV officials oppose any system that would explain why a rating was given. With conservative religious groups offended by references to abortion, and animal rights activists inundating networks with mail complaining of their treatment of animals, network officials contend that the rating categories would proliferate.

But if Valenti fails to come up with a system that includes content description, he will be besieged by complaints from medical and parental groups. “An age rating is insufficient,” says Phillips of the American Psychiatric Assn. The national PTA stands ready to implement a grass-roots letter-writing campaign to the FCC--like the one that ultimately helped force the networks to offer three hours of educational programming a week--if content is left out.

Valenti, no stranger to the art of Washington spin, is already low-balling expectations about the welcome mat that will be rolled out for his TV ratings system next year. “We’re going to be assaulted, no question about it,” he says. “If we satisfy one-half of the people out there, I think it would be a glorious triumph.”

“Jack Valenti is the single person in the country with the prestige and drive to pull together these diverse interests,” says Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Assn. “He has bipartisan respect, the respect of related industries, and he has the stature to make it happen. He pulled off a minor miracle getting these parties to agree to agree.

“Now he has to pull off a major miracle.”

*

JACK VALENTI OPENS THE DOOR TO HIS northwest Washington home and I meet Grady. The dog. An English springer spaniel, to be exact. Valenti’s kissy-face play with his pet is a constant source of amusement for those who have been at the receiving end of his ceaseless demands and tireless expectations that they, too, be as driven as he. Valenti staffers quickly learn two rules: 1) Even if you can answer the first 19 questions he asks, he’s sure to ask a 20th question that you don’t know the answer to. 2) If you don’t know the answer, don’t try to fake it. Big mistake.

On this September morning, Valenti’s wife, Mary Margaret Wiley, a former LBJ aide known for her quiet but savvy political acumen, sets the table for her birthday luncheon with their three grown children. The couple’s eldest daughter, Courtenay, is a Warner Bros. vice president. Their son, John, is in the interactive technology business. Their youngest daughter, Alexandra, a computer graphics designer who inherited her father’s dark good looks and imprinted them with her own flower-child style, flits in and out of the house.

Mary Margaret designed the French-style house nearly 30 years ago, shortly after her husband took over the MPAA. The touches of European grace she has added since recall for Valenti his first attraction to her. “She was so charming and elegant,” he says. “She did not settle for ordinary things. There had to be an innate beauty about it.” Minutes after noticing her in Sen. Johnson’s entourage, he switched place cards at a political event so that he could sit next to her.

With seven bedrooms, the house is big but not extravagant. Valenti’s top-floor study, where he does most of his writing, is still cooled by an old box air-conditioner sitting in the window. There is a Nautilus-equipped gym in the basement--workouts are daily rituals for both Valentis--alongside a movie room with a screen that emerges at the touch of a button. But both basement rooms are modest, neither offering the kind of hyper-tech thrills that can be found on many a Hollywood producer’s estate.

The Valentis regularly host small Washington dinner parties, culling guests from well-entrenched corridors of power, favorites from the Hollywood oldies playlist and media stars such as George Will, Sam Donaldson, William Safire, Ben Bradlee. Fourteen guests are seated at a round table, and after the crab cakes are served, Valenti taps his glass and--transforming into a sort of John McLaughlin--throws out an issue for discussion. (Side-to-side conversations are strongly discouraged.)

The intellectually charged debates that break out during these parties remain one of Valenti’s favorite aspects of Washington life. “The conversation becomes incandescent, sparkling, full of zest,” he says. Then he adds, without interrupting the rhythmic drumming of his speech, “I do not invite people who are dull. Dullness is the one sin from which there is no expiation.”

Valenti is an acquired taste, one that some never acquire. His baroque rhetorical style--crammed with lofty adjectives, littered with weighty historical quotes, delivered with a Texan drawl--provides ready fodder for critics eager to dismiss him as a blowhard, a caricature of the Renaissance man. But there are plenty of others who find much to admire in Valenti’s self-styled grandiloquence, even if it’s just the thread he offers to a past where Olympian ideas and historical insight actually mattered. “People come just to hear Jack testify” on Capitol Hill, says Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City). “People come to see the art form.”

If Valenti’s behind-the-scenes political strategy could be summed up in one phrase, it would be this: Poison ‘em with sugar. In the heat of a legislative battle, he will stand up on a podium and extol the virtues of his opponents, by name. Like his mentor LBJ, he’s an avid letter-writer, keenly aware that today’s House freshman is tomorrow’s committee chair. (“I am exultant in your victory,” he reportedly wrote to Illinois Rep. Henry J. Hyde when Hyde was first elected 26 years ago, well before he became the legislative force he is today.)

Valenti has a crafty political mind. The MPAA studio chiefs remain indebted to him for forestalling the repeal of the so-called financial-syndication rules for 15 years, cutting the networks out of hundreds of millions in TV rerun money. In the early 1980s, when the FCC voted to repeal the rules, Valenti went to Congress--”I must have talked to 30 senators,” he says now--and persuaded allies to attach an amendment to pending budget legislation forbidding the agency from spending any money to fund the repeal. “The networks were caught sleeping on that one,” he says now.

CBS lobbyist Martin Franks recalls, during a much later chapter in the battle, going to bed one night thinking that the networks had won a key FCC battle--and waking up the next morning to find out Valenti had succeeded in reversing the decision. “I told Jack last year I’d be happy to renegotiate his contract if my fee could be a fraction of what he saved the studios,” says Franks.

*

TO UNDERSTAND VALENTI, and the direction his searing ambition took after his Houston boyhood, it’s useful first to think about what he isn’t: At 5 feet 4 inches, Valenti was never going to be an athlete or the kind of imposing figure able to command a room like LBJ. With a father working as a clerk in the county tax office, he didn’t have an established pedigree. He didn’t grow up particularly well schooled or well traveled: He didn’t leave Harris County until well into his teens, and his second-generation Italian parents--while supportive of his interest in books--were hardly avid readers themselves.

Inside Johnson’s White House, where he became the president’s trusted aide, he was not a policy maker; he was not one of the best and brightest; he was not a Groton/Yale product of the establishment. He was a Johnson intimate, but also a ready target for Johnson’s notorious bullying and anger. “In front of visiting dignitaries, [LBJ] was wont to put up his feet on Jack Valenti’s lap and use it as a stool,” David Halberstam wrote in “The Best and the Brightest.” Valenti described himself as the president’s “roving quarterback.” But behind his back, others sniped that he was Johnson’s “glorified valet.”

When Valenti told an advertising audience that “I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently, because Lyndon Johnson is my president,” columnists poked fun at him; editorial cartoonists lampooned him. Herblock caricatured him as a slave, with an overseer in the figure of LBJ whipping him while he insists he sleeps better at night. “I was an outsider,” Valenti says today, noting that he had used those words for their poetic cadence. “I was not part of the elite, part of the D.C. establishment. And I was naive.”

When he first met Johnson, then a senator from Texas, Valenti wrote a gushing column in the Houston Post: “There is a gentleness in his manner, but there is no disguising the taut, crackling energies that spill out of him.” Valenti named two of his children, Courtenay Lynda and John Lyndon, after the former president. In 1976, he wrote a memoir extolling this “very human president.”

Valenti remains the self-appointed defender of LBJ’s reputation, lambasting Robert A. Caro’s critical biography of the late president and publicly attacking Oliver Stone’s historically dubious film “JFK” as a “hoax,” a “smear,” “pure fiction” that rivaled Nazi propaganda films. (Though, displaying his classic political acumen, he waited until four months after its release and three days after the Oscars before issuing his indictment; officials at Warner Bros., the MPAA studio that produced “JFK,” let the whole incident slide.)

It would be simplistic to say that Valenti’s relentless literary allusions are an attempted entree to the establishment that spurned him. Valenti’s intellectual passions and his love of finely crafted prose are as real as his attraction to power.

But this is Valenti as the No. 2 man, attaching himself to a towering public figure like LBJ, whose stature he could never approach, quoting and requoting great historical figures such as British historian Lord Macaulay, trying but knowing full well that he could never reach their heights in prose and ideas.

There is also the side of Valenti that stands on its own: His drive, his energy, his sheer will to leave an imprint, his success at inventing himself. “He’s a small man who’s very much larger than life,” says Brad Radnitz, president of the Writers Guild of America.

In this, two images of Valenti should be kept in mind: The first, as a young man, Jack Valenti turning the pages of a classical treatise with one hand, running a razor across the shaving cream on his face with the other. The second, an elderly man, jogging between holes on the golf course, refusing to rent a cart.

His family’s lack of money didn’t prevent him from attending the University of Houston and, later, Harvard Business School. During his undergraduate years, he attended night classes and spent his days working at an oil company; for his graduate education, he managed to secure the help of a wealthy oil executive. He flew 51 missions as a bomber pilot over Europe, was decorated four times, parked the plane at the close of World War II and hasn’t sat in a cockpit since.

At age 27 he was running the advertising and promotions department for Humble Oil and Refining Co. His boss gave him this piece of advice: “Read, read, keep reading. Memorize what you read. It’s the only way to become an educated man.” At 31, Valenti started his own advertising agency with his college classmate, Weldon Weekley. They built it from a three-person operation to a 45-employee agency with broad political contacts. “The fun, the unduplicatable fun of building something that’s never existed before,” he says now. “It was like being on a high.”

He wrote a novel in 1992, a political thriller set in Washington, edited by Jackie Onassis and published by Doubleday. He could just as well have been writing about his own drive when he crafted this description of a fictional senator: “His ambition flung itself against every man-made obstacle . . . he was willing to extract more from himself and from those who worked for him than the average political leader . . . days blended into night without any slackening of his energy.”

Valenti has written four books and is at work on his second novel, which he says will have more velocity and fewer adjectives than the first. “Writing is therapy for me,” he has said. “I disconnect from everything when I watch words form and march in serried ranks across a page. Quite sensual.”

Valenti says he finally took the MPAA job Lew Wasserman offered him in 1966 after turning it down twice. When he started, the movie studios were operating under the so-called Hays Production Code, guidelines for censorship that began with the sentence, “No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it” and devolved from there. Blasphemy and profanity were forbidden; as were “lustful” kissing and embraces. “In general, passion should be treated in such manner as not to stimulate the baser emotions,” the code stipulated.

But directors both European and American were pressing hard against those boundaries with films such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blowup” and Mike Nichols’ “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” “There were already 40-plus censorship boards in this country,” Valenti recalls. “We realized we had to do something.”

*

PHRASES LIKE “SCREW” and “hump the hostess”--the words that got “Virginia Woolf” in trouble--are downright quaint in the movie business these days, where vulgar invective is a poor cloak for bad writing. Today’s religious and social conservatives are vociferous about the devolving state of pop culture’s dialogue. But to a growing number of parents, doctors and teachers, the issue goes beyond matters of public morality. They worry about the future well-being and health of children growing up in a world where the media reinforce the destructive behavior models they see around them.

“This is a public health issue,” says Michael Brody of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. “I watch television. I like television. But I’m worried about kids with compromised immune systems,” he adds, referring to children left unsupervised, often in homes or neighborhoods where violence is common.

At the other end of the spectrum are Hollywood writers, directors and producers--many of whom are even more vehemently opposed to a TV ratings system than the networks are. Steven Bochco, whose new CBS series “Public Morals” ran afoul of the network’s internal censors for racy language, has raised concerns that ratings will “have a chilling effect on development.” And Leonard Stern, president of the Producers Guild, says, “Everyone is afraid they’ll be trampling on the Constitution.”

Valenti himself has made clear that the TV ratings system he devises will be a guideline for parents, not a form of censorship for adults. Young children are his focus, and ratings for teenagers will probably be omitted. Sports and news programs won’t be rated.

Taking Valenti at his word, medical researchers and children’s advocates optimistically filed into Valenti’s office last summer, armed with data they hoped would bolster his effort. They offered evidence and concerns about rising levels of anxiety in young children watching frightening programs, of a desensitization of older children routinely exposed to violence without consequence.

But Valenti isn’t much taken with the “experts,” dismissing social scientists as practitioners of “an imprecise art form.” Valenti invited in the “experts,” listened to them, gave his pitch for the responsibility of parents in monitoring TV programming and promised to be in touch.

So far, not much of the “be-in-touch” promise has materialized, though Valenti says he will seek their input again once a draft ratings system is finished. “By Mr. Valenti’s own admission, the ratings committee is not versed in child-development issues,” says Dr. Jim Holroyd, chair of the media resource team for the American Academy of Pediatrics. “We told them they need to educate themselves about these issues. But aside from one meeting, no one has heard a word.”

Ginny Markell, the PTA’s vice president of programs, worries that the industry group is not talking to enough parents and says her group is surveying members. But that survey won’t be completed until late this year, when Valenti’s group will likely be putting the final touches on a rating system.

While Valenti says his committee is conducting focus groups with parents, it’s not clear that he himself has a visceral understanding of the modern media world that parents must maneuver. “If a 2- or 3-year-old is watching anything,” he’ll say, “they ought to be watching ‘Old Yeller’ or ‘Willie the Whale,’ like my kids did.”

Whether the committee will distinguish between today’s versions of “Old Yeller” and lucrative children’s programs that medical experts say are inappropriate for pre-schoolers--such as “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” and “Batman”--remains to be seen.

Reflecting his populism and devout Catholic roots, however, Valenti puts religious leaders in a different category--less a pressure group than a reliable barometer of the baselines of American morality. He appointed two church officials to sit as non-voting observers on the MPAA’s industry-only appeals board.

“Unlike most American politicians, he has a deep appreciation for staying in touch with religious groups in this country,” says Jim Wall, editor of the Christian Century and a spokesman for the National Council of Churches.

The tightrope that Valenti is walking between the perceptions of outside groups and that of the industry he represents can be measured in these two comments:

From Burtch Drake, president of the American Assn. of Advertising Agencies: “This [call for TV ratings] is hogwash. The TV industry got pressured into this thing. Ninety-nine percent of all commercial television is pretty clean.”

From Jeff McIntyre, senior legislative analyst for the American Psychological Assn.: “Things are pretty saucy on TV now.”

Actually, most experts agree that prime-time television programming has become less violent. But, as any parent knows, children’s cartoons still brim with laser fire and explosions. Words like “butt” and “suck”are used in many children’s shows without a second thought. And the networks permit increasingly sexually explicit fare on shows airing between 8 and 9 p.m. The Virginia-based Media Research Center found words such as “ass,” “bitch” and “bastard” commonly used in that time slot. On an episode of NBC’s “Friends,” schoolchildren interrupted a sexual encounter in a museum, and risque boudoir scenes are common fare on Fox’s “Melrose Place.” In the 9 to 10 p.m. slot, young viewers can hear talk of orgasms (ABC’s “Spin City”) and masturbation (NBC’s “Seinfeld”).

Large advertising dollars are at stake, especially for the networks. But how ratings will affect audiences is still unclear, say industry sources. Will a mature rating label ward viewers off and scare advertisers away, or could it lure a bigger audience? The networks, who lost millions in advertising dollars when, three years ago under congressional pressure, they agreed to place advisories on shows with very mature themes, are nervous.

But Holroyd of the American Academy of Pediatrics says he hopes advertising revenues will shift toward quality programming. The lost revenue to networks, he contends, is dwarfed by the indirect costs of desensitizing generations of children to physical force and gratuitous violence.

Satisfying these wide ranges of concern and interest is going to be a delicate task for Valenti. Says Franks of CBS: “My biggest concern is that it is still going to be a wonderful political issue to beat up the networks. Jack Valenti could walk down from Mount Sinai with the answer etched in stone and present it to the assembled [masses]--we’re still going to get hammered.”

Valenti’s great skill in a town where wheels can spin endlessly without direction is his ability to bring closure to a debate. “He listens to everyone. He lets everyone have their say,” says the National Cable TV Assn.’s Anstrom. “But in the end, he knows when to call for a vote.”

The vote he calls for in the next couple months will be the industry’s.

WE ARE UPSTAIRS IN Valenti’s study. Across from us are bookshelves brimming with Disraeli and Churchill and Macaulay and Talleyrand--all of which, Valenti is quick to point out, he has read.

Valenti is mulling questions about the TV ratings system. He runs at each issue I bring up from one side, then the other, then throws it back at me. How do you devise a system that is simple enough to fit on a TV grid in the newspaper? Does it make sense to label a show or movie “violent” when the violence can range from the gunshots in “High Noon” to the graphic blood-spatters in “Pulp Fiction”? “I just don’t believe you can slice things that thin,” he says.

Valenti insists that he hasn’t made up his mind on any of these issues. “I’m spending a lot of my waking and sleeping moments thinking about this thing, over and over and over again,” he says. “OK, I’ve got a category, how do you get a guideline, how do you communicate this to the producer? If a parent sees this, how will they feel? How do you communicate it to them? Each question has to be thought through, just like a military campaign.”

The movie rating system he developed 28 years ago has been through a lot of criticism and a little change. He insists that despite its imperfections, the system has integrity, and that no one can accuse the MPAA of “playing cute around the turns.”

Whatever he comes up with for TV will be attacked. Valenti being Valenti, he will spin it as a morally upright system, a good-faith effort and a revolutionary step for the television industry. And, Valenti being Valenti, he won’t walk away from the shrapnel when it starts to fall. “When things go wrong, people look for scapegoats,” he has said of his unwavering loyalty to LBJ. “I may be wrong but, by God, I never jumped ship.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Channel Surfing

Valenti and his executive committee have met with the following groups to get their input on a TV ratings system:

MEDICAL GROUPS

American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

American Academy of Pediatrics

American Medical Assn.

American Nurses Assn.

American Psychiatric Assn.

American Psychological Assn.

Institute for Mental Health Initiatives

CHILDREN’S GROUPS

Children Now

EDUCATION GROUPS

American Federation of Teachers

American Assn. of School Administrators

National Assn. of Elementary School Principals

National Assn. of School Psychologists

National School Boards Assn.

RECREATIONAL SOFTWARE ADVISORY COUNCIL MEETING

National Foundation for the Improvement of Education

Recreational Software Advisory Council

Software Publisher Assn.

CANADIAN BROADCASTERS AND CABLE PROGRAMMERS

The Action Group on Violence on Television

Canadian Assn. of Broadcasters

Canadian Cable Television Assn.

The Discovery Channel

ADVERTISING GROUPS

American Assn. of Advertising Agencies

RELIGIOUS GROUPS

The American Baptist Churches USA

The Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs

Christian Century

Christian Life Commission Southern Baptist Convention

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints

Congress of National Black Churches, Inc.

The Episcopal Church

The Lutheran Council of USA

National Assn. of Evangelicals

The Presbyterian Church

The Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc.

Union of American Hebrew Congregations

United Church of Christ

The United Methodist Church

The United States Catholic Conference

PTA

National PTA

ACADEMIC GROUPS

Annenberg School of Communication

Duke Program on Violence and the Media

Harvard University

UC Santa Barbara

University of Texas, Austin

University of Wisconsin

CHILD ADVOCACY GROUPS (Scheduled Meetings)

Action for Children’s Television

American Center for Children’s Television

Center for Media and Public Affairs

Center for Media Education

Center for Media Literacy

Children NOW

Children’s Defense Fund

The Coalition for America’s Children

Just Think Foundation

National Alliance for Non-Violent Programming

National Assn. of Child Advocates

National Children’s Coalition

National Coalition on Television Violence

National Foundation to Improve TV

Save the Children

Working for Alternatives to Violence in Entertainment

TV Ratings Timeline

7 DAYS IN FEBRUARIES

Feb. 1, 1996

* Congress passes telecommunications legislation.

Feb. 8, 1996

* President Clinton signs telecommunications law. The entertainment industry has one year to devise a ratings system, otherwise the Federal Communications Commission will draw up guidelines for rating programs.

Feb. 9, 1996

* Valenti meets with studio chiefs in Los Angeles and secures agreement to pursue a voluntary ratings system for TV.

Feb. 13, 1996

* Valenti meets with network, cable and studio representatives, and shortly after begins process of building industry-wide coalition.

Feb. 29, 1996

* Valenti brings leading executives from studios and broadcast and cable industries to the White House, announcing that, “We hope to have this new rating system in place no later than January, 1997.”

Feb. 8, 1997

* Congressional deadline for industry ratings system.

Feb. 8, 1998

* The FCC hasn’t ruled on when new television sets must be equipped with the V-chip, technology enabling parents to block out specific programs. But this i s the earliest deadline date it can set. Expect sets to start rolling out with the technology even before this.