Network Receives Enhanced Warnings

It’s getting easier and easier to side with NBC in the battle between politicians and the peacock.

This is the one in which a very few truncheon-swinging federal lawmakers are having a strategically loud and public snit over NBC’s insistence on continuing to air its programs with age-based ratings (augmented by occasional longer advisories) instead of using the expanded content-based ratings adopted “voluntarily” by virtually the rest of the industry under threat of decapitation by the government.

Led by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), these congressional media-opsters have made NBC’s resistance their headline-grabbing mantra of the moment, mounting their highly visible soap boxes and beating their chests in unison, spewing threats like stump rhetoric and accusing the network of being this year’s Enemy of the American Family.

McCain to NBC President and CEO Bob Wright in a letter last week that the senator’s office released to the media:

“I call upon NBC one last time. . . .” One last time before . . . what?

No gentlemanly Senatespeak here. McCain, who is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, went on to threaten reprisals against a noncompliant NBC, including urging the Federal Communications Commission to consider yanking the licenses of stations “that do not adopt the revised TV ratings system.”

Translation: NBC stations.

McCain also threatened to call for a vote in the Senate on a bill, written by Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.), that would restrict to late-night hours violent programming on networks that omit content-based ratings.

Translation: NBC.

“By its failure to adopt the [new] TV ratings system,” McCain wrote, “NBC challenges us to choose between NBC’s interests and the interests of parents and children.” Oh, brother. NBC is no stranger to resplendent self-glorification. But doing the most strutting in this case are the peacocks inside the Beltway.

Instituted Jan. 1, the less-precise old program ratings system used only age-oriented symbols such as TV-14 (possibly inappropriate for the under-14 crowd) to designate the suitability of programs for kids. Making its debut Wednesday (though not on NBC) was the new system--actually an expansion of the old system allowing for symbols to be added for sex (S), violence (V), coarse language (L) and suggestive dialogue (D). Ultimately, these ratings will coincide with a program-blocking V-chip federally mandated for new TV sets.

The new expanded ratings are, indeed, more informative. For example, NBC stamped a TV-14 alert on Thursday’s heavily sex-oriented episode of “Seinfeld,” an appropriate but relatively vague designation that would have been more effective with an (S) for sex or (D) for dialogue, or both, as provided under the new system adopted by NBC’s competitors.

But that’s not the point.

The point is this: It’s parents and other ordinary viewers that NBC must please, not politicians or TV critics or even activist groups, however well intentioned.

NBC maintains that the old ratings are sufficient and that imposition of the new ones through congressional pressure (calling them voluntary is funnier than most sitcoms) constitutes an undemocratic government intrusion.

Has NBC made a huge miscalculation?

Well, God bless America, for viewers offended by NBC’s well-publicized position can express their outrage by not watching NBC programs. After all, it’s not as if they have no TV options, as if it’s either hitting “Homicide: Life on the Street” or the sack.

And just how ticked off at NBC are viewers? So much so that national Nielsens for this season’s opening week found NBC again atop the heap. So much so that NBC estimated that 61 million watched at least some of its season-opening live “ER.” So much so that “Seinfeld” that week drew its largest audience ever, a cool 38 million.

Now, these audience figures apply to programs that aired in the week prior to the new content ratings going into effect. So is it just possible that Nielsens for last week, most of which came under the new content ratings, will tell a different story, one that will have NBC slinking off with its tail feathers between its legs?

About as possible as an outbreak of wisdom, restraint and integrity on Capitol Hill.

McCain gets a rating of (TV-B) for using bullying bluster to inflate this dispute way, way out of proportion to public interest, with an assist from his allies Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.). The latter recently warned NBC that “. . . pride goeth before the fall--and I’m not talking about the fall schedule.”

Just what is Lieberman talking about? The senator speculated ominously about what may happen “if NBC continues to thumb its nose at the nation’s parents.”

Yikes!

Just how is NBC being cavalier with parents when the parent groups that publicly advocated the old ratings system that NBC is still running did not lobby for the expanded ratings that NBC has subsequently rejected? The push for the new system came not from them but from Congress and from various public-interest groups, none of which, by the way, has publicly supported these latest coercive tactics by McCain and his crowd to bring NBC to heel.

These guys have repeatedly insisted that they have absolutely no interest in regulating TV content, but based on the tone of their rhetoric, you have to wonder.

NBC stations that don’t carry the new ratings being deprived of their licenses by an FCC known to revoke a license only when a station manager publicly defecates on the screen? With scores and scores of stations ignoring the public interest in infinite ways, the FCC is going to penalize NBC stations merely for omitting the more detailed program labels that McCain wants them to carry?

It . . . won’t . . . happen. Nor is there much hope for the Hollings bill. Should it pass in the Senate, it faces potential extinction in the House, whose Rep. W. J. “Billy” Tauzin (R-La.), chairman of the commerce subcommittee that would consider it, said recently: “This should be a matter between NBC and its viewers, not a gun to NBC’s head from Congress.”

He’s right, and in his heart of hearts, McCain may know he’s right. But show a politician a soapbox, and he will come.