New Campaign Urges Parents to Put Pressure on Hollywood

A broad coalition of prominent Americans--from former Presidents Ford and Carter to celebrities such as Steve Allen--today will launch a new initiative urging parents to step up the pressure on Hollywood to adopt a voluntary code of conduct for entertainment aimed at children.

The “Appeal to Hollywood,” which urges parents to call, write and send e-mail messages to industry executives, is the latest effort in the wake of a spate of school shootings to reduce what the initiative describes as the “increasingly toxic popular culture” in television, movies, music and video games and on the Internet.

“This is not an attack on Hollywood,” Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), an organizer of the campaign, said Tuesday. “This is an appeal to Hollywood to join us in a broad national effort to reduce the avalanche of messages that our kids receive about violence and sex.”

Congress already is moving toward approving an anti-trust exemption to permit industry executives to collaborate on a voluntary “code of conduct,” and President Clinton has launched a federal inquiry into the industry’s marketing to children. But this new effort urges parents to take their concerns directly to Hollywood.

The strongly worded appeal, which alleges a direct link between violent entertainment and recent “killing sprees” by teenagers, urges “those who are reaping great profits to give something back.”

It asks entertainment industry executives to set minimum standards for explicit material in each medium, to pledge an overall reduction in the level of entertainment violence and to ban the marketing of adult-oriented entertainment to youngsters.

The appeal also calls for more family-oriented entertainment and the revival of “safe havens” for family programming on television.

Carole Shields, president of the liberal group People for the American Way, co-founded by producer Norman Lear, said that the proposal for a code of conduct is too simplistic.

“It clearly assumes that the industry is the problem and they can fix it,” Shields said. “It’s sort of they’re guilty until proven innocent.”

Joan Bertin, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, said: “This is an old-fashioned morality campaign, just like the frothing at the mouth about comic books in the 1950s.”

But supporters of the code said that they are not advocating censorship.

Lieberman said that industry executives have told him, “ ‘Look, we don’t really want to put this stuff on the air, but once our competitors start doing it and they begin to cut into our market share, we have no choice.’ We started to talk about codes of conduct as a way for all the competitors to draw some lines around the industry in which they will compete.”

Joining Lieberman in the campaign are William J. Bennett, co-founder of the Washington-based conservative think tank, Empower America and a former Education secretary, and Sens. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.).

All four signed a letter sent to industry executives Tuesday asking that they “step up [to] the plate and shoulder [their] responsibilities for the safety of our children and the moral health of our culture.”

The appeal has been endorsed by more than 50 politicians, academics and business and religious leaders. Retired Generals Colin L. Powell and H. Norman Schwarzkopf and former New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo are among its signers.

The appeal is written in the form of a petition that will be posted on the Internet (at www.media-appeal.org) for anyone to sign.

Notably absent are any of the entertainment industry’s top brass. In fact, only six of those listed have any link to Hollywood and only four of those are recognizable names: Allen and fellow entertainers Naomi Judd, Carol Lawrence and Joan Van Ark.

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Simon reported from Washington and Wallace from Los Angeles.

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