L for Lack of Interest

Call it the issue that wasn’t, and still isn’t.

Those revolutionary parental guidance ratings that define program content throughout the airwaves? You’d think they were the major story about television in 1997, given the fueling by Capitol Hill politicians and special interest groups and the coverage granted it by much of the media (including yours truly).

In terms of space and headlines, the new ratings probably did stand tallest. Talk about your basic misreadings of U.S. attitudes, though. If this issue were a prime-time series, it would be canceled for lack of public interest. These program labels have not altered viewing habits perceptibly, especially those of the kids they’re most designed to protect. Nor is there any public dialogue about them above a murmur.

Is the industry doing an honest job of labeling its programs, accurately reflecting what they contain? For the most part, yes. At the very least, though, it’s a topic worthy of discussion.

Mention it in casual conversation, however, and you become the babbling drunk on a bar stool whom people flee or turn their backs on. Their eyes glaze over and retreat deep into their sockets beneath leaden lids.

The evidence seems irrefutable. Measured against the death of Princess Diana or the adventures of Marv Albert, for example, the issue of content ratings is as compelling to most Americans as the fine print of their insurance policies. Fine print that’s in everyone’s best interest to carefully read, of course, but you know how that goes. Marv-mania was so much juicier.

Perhaps the intricacies of the ratings are intimidating or too confusing. Perhaps they are too new to have sunk in fully with a public too preoccupied with other matters to notice the symbols now appearing on entertainment programs. Or, despite repeated outcries against TV sexiness and violence in the 1990s, perhaps the masses don’t understand what’s at stake, don’t comprehend the importance of TV programs being an open book in advance so that parents can make more informed decisions about what their kids watch.

Nahhhhhh.

Much more likely, even if they’re parents themselves, people get the meaning just fine, thank you very much, and don’t especially care. What else can you infer from this disinterest?

A short history:

Rarely has something “voluntary” seemed as mandatory as the labeling of TV programs for “sexual, violent or other indecent material” encouraged by the Telecommunications Act that was enacted by Congress in 1996. After all, such ratings are essential to the operation of the V-chip, a piece of program-blocking circuitry that the act specifically requires manufacturers to install in new TV sets starting in 1998, guaranteeing a gradual entry of the technology into every home. The V-chip and corresponding content ratings were injected into the new communications act by politicians claiming to speak for the multitudes who supposedly were fed up with TV and wanted more control over what their children viewed.

With this bazooka pressed to its temple, the industry reluctantly capitulated, and last Jan. 1 began branding entertainment programs with somewhat vague, age-oriented symbols similar to those applied to theatrical movies: TV-G (general audience), TV-PG (parental guidance advised), TV-PG-14 (possibly not so good for the under-14 crowd) and the rarely used TV-MA (for mature audiences). There also are two labels for programming specifically aimed at children: TV-Y (all ages) and TV-Y7 (for children 7 and older).

End of story, the industry and its critics strolling off together into an orange sunset? Hardly.

Stampeded by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and a few other members of Congress who insisted that the new content ratings were inadequate, nearly all of television expanded them Oct. 1 to include the following specific designations: S (sex), V (violence), L (coarse language), D (suggestive dialogue) and FV (for children’s programs containing fantasy violence).

Gambling that the public could not care less about more detailed ratings, NBC stubbornly held out, its intransigence earning it the wrath of McCain and some of his colleagues but apparently not of many viewers, judging by the network’s continuing atop the prime-time Nielsen rankings this season (although edged by CBS in the November sweeps).

As McCain knows, no one ever lost an election by denigrating the media, especially television.

On the other hand, you can understand elected officeholders, as well as special interest groups, wanting to make the broadcast industry accountable to the public in addition to stockholders. For the privilege of profiting so extraordinarily from the medium--to say nothing of the lucrative digital high-definition TV revolution expected to arrive in the next decade--these entrepreneurs of the airwaves should be giving more back.

Meaningful content ratings are a nice start--something to have as a potential tool, at least, even should the public have no immediate great passion for using them.

Naysayers within the industry equate the new ratings with censorship, insisting that identifying content will inhibit sponsors from advertising on programs, thus making the television establishment even less receptive to bold, innovative fare. They seem to be saying, in other words, that expanding information equals suppression, a bit of logic that remains murky.

Not that it’s any clearer how much of the United States cares about content ratings in any form, even though they were supposedly instituted on the public’s behalf. The truest test will come when viewers gain the V-chip capacity to electronically bar from their homes programs whose content ratings they find objectionable. Meantime, much of the kid front seems unfazed by the new ratings to date. Just look at this:

Shows with one or more of the S, V, L and D content ratings are generally drawing as many kid viewers as they were before the guidelines, according to Nielsen Media Research data for late 1997 cited recently in the industry journal Electronic Media.

A case in point is ABC’s “NYPD Blue,” among TV’s very best hours but also one whose usual TV-14 advisory, with an S, L, V or D, accurately defines it as a cop series whose violence, coarse talk and occasional extreme bawdiness would make it off limits to the younger set. Or so you’d think.

Yet more than 630,000 children under 12 watched “NYPD Blue” each week from Oct. 1 to Nov. 16 this year, Nielsen reports--about the same number tuning in weekly during nearly the same period in 1996, when there were no labels.

Nielsen figures show, moreover, that kid viewership for Fox’s “Beverly Hills, 90210” and “Melrose Place” (which carry various combinations of S, L and V advisories) are virtually unchanged from a corresponding period of 1996.

Are all of these young viewers latchkey kids who have no adult supervision? Or do some of them have parents who carefully note the ratings, then watch the programs with their kids and use them to initiate family discussions about the material?

Ay, Caramba! What does all of this mean? Possibly that viewers are not as easily pigeon-holed as politicians barricaded behind the Beltway seem to believe. And that those claiming to speak for the public have narrower constituencies than they would have you think.

Take the ever-noisy, ever-vocal anti-violence crowd, for example. Just as the CBS hit series “Touched by an Angel” each week affirms the hunger in America for prime-time drama that promotes spirituality, so too do hefty ratings for the same network’s 1997 miniseries, “The Last Don” and “Bella Mafia,” demonstrate as large an appetite for gratuitous, graphic depictions of violence. That conflicts with the prevailing wisdom in some circles that a preponderance of viewers is repulsed by TV violence.

This is where those content labels help. Assuming that the audiences don’t overlap, will the CBS Godly viewers someday use V-chips to automatically zap from their homes the network’s TV-14 Godfathers? It hardly matters. What matters more is that they have the opportunity to do so.