Lawmakers, Groups Rip TV Ratings Plan

The television industry’s new system of rating television shows came under blistering attack from two directions--members of Congress and a coalition of children’s advocacy groups--in comments directed to the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday.

Commenting on whether the industry’s age-based rating approach is what Congress intended when it enacted last year’s law deregulating the telecommunications industry, 16 House members and seven senators said in a letter that the system falls short because it provides parents with too little information about program content.

The elected officials, all of whom played substantial roles in passing the law that led to the TV ratings, called on the FCC to withhold approval of the system.

“The TV industry has taken a four-month detour with an age-based system that doesn’t do what Congress, and parents, want them to do,” Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) said in an interview Tuesday. Industry executives “will get away with this if they can, but the FCC should not approve such a fraudulent system.”

The congressional criticism was echoed by a coalition of 20 groups, including the National Parent-Teacher Assns., the American Psychological Assn., the National Assn. of Elementary School Principals, the Children’s Defense Fund and the National Council of La Raza.

Tuesday was the deadline for public comment on the rating system before the FCC makes a judgment on it. The agency has not indicated when it will issue its ruling.

Quoting from the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the members of Congress wrote: “It was our intention to stimulate the development of a ratings system that would permit the ‘identification and rating of video programming that contains sexual, violent or other indecent material about which parents should be informed before it is displayed to children.’ ”

The bill mandated inclusion of V-chips--electronic blocking devices--in new TV sets by 1998 that would enable parents and others to regulate what is beamed into their homes. But, the members of Congress wrote, “it is our view that the age-based rating system proposed by the industry undermines the usefulness of the V-chip to such an extent that the purposes of the statute cannot be fulfilled.”

With President Clinton also applying pressure on the issue, the industry introduced in January a rating system based on the one used for motion pictures. The television system has been controversial since it began, largely because it provides no specific labeling for a program’s sexual content, violence or profane language.

The letter from the coalition of parent and children-advocacy groups said that the industry’s system “substitutes the self-interested judgment of Hollywood producers for what should be the child-rearing judgment of parents.”

The letter said that the rating system combines “sex, violence and adult language into . . . categories . . . so broad that disparate content receives the same rating. It is unacceptable because it [prevents] parents from specifically blocking televised violence, which Congress found to be a major factor contributing to the public-health problem of violence in society. The [FCC] should find it unacceptable and insist upon a content-based ratings system.”

In a speech at the National Assn. of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas on Monday, Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America and the chief architect of the TV rating system, maintained that such critics are a minority.

“We are not going to make any major revisions until the parents of America tell us they want a change,” Valenti said. “Our system is not designed for Congress,” he said, asking for a full year, as Clinton initially pledged, to evaluate its merits.

Valenti was criticized Tuesday by those who oppose the ratings system for intransigence in his continuing opposition to making any changes in the guidelines.

“Mr. Valenti has been amazingly inflexible in the face of enormous criticism from serious people who are concerned about this issue,” said Kathryn Montgomery, president of the Center for Media Education, a children’s advocacy group.

Times staff writer Brian Lowry contributed to this story from Las Vegas.