Parents Ignore the TV Ratings Safety Net

If print media had the same token constraints TV does, this article would be rated Newspaper-14 due to references to sex and violence and some big words they indubitably don’t teach before high school age.

And most parents probably wouldn’t pay the content warning much mind, just as, a new study shows, they aren’t doing with the TV ratings.

That’s a shame because, for all their confounding alphabet-soup qualities, the ratings are a relatively pain-free way for those parents who say TV is a cultural sinkhole to try to keep their kids from falling in.

You remember the TV ratings, don’t you? Everybody (except 1st Amendment sticklers and TV networks) was eager to have them back in 1997.

The controversy over their implementation marked the moment most of us first heard of Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, the very concerned-seeming fellow who helped head the ratings effort before joining a presidential campaign that couldn’t lose.

The movie-style ratings TV ended up with (TVG, TVPG, TV14, etc.) went hand-in-hand with the device called the V-chip, a Canadian invention that lets TV shows be blocked from appearing in homes according to their ratings.

The ratings survived mockery from people like me (sample from column proposing additional ratings: “TVMF: Program contains euphemisms for rough language”) and are with us, in a manner of speaking, to this day.

But don’t you dare blink. They pop up at the beginnings of shows as one more tidbit of visual clutter, one that doesn’t remain on screen nearly as long as NBC’s perpetual Olympic rings advertisement or even those HBO warnings (by which I mean, of course, enticements) about whether a movie has brief nudity (“BN”) or not.

V-chips, meanwhile, are becoming ubiquitous. Sets equipped with them are in about 40% of American homes already, according to the new survey, largely because Congress mandated that just about every set for sale since January 2000 contain one.

But the chips and ratings have not been implanted into hearts and minds as they have been in televisions.

You could look at the new Kaiser Family Foundation report and argue differently.

The California group’s survey, after all, found that 56% of parents said they have used the ratings to guide viewing choices.

Poppycock--to use a word that would not earn an “L” for bad language.

More precisely, 56% of 800 parents surveyed told their phone questioner that they had used the ratings.

The question might as well have been phrased: “Do you want me to think you’re a good parent, or a bad one?” It’s more amazing that 44% had the courage to say they hadn’t.

Only 28% of parents told the questioner that they use the ratings regularly, a less-than-overwhelming proportion and, again, a number that is surely higher than what hidden-camera observation would reveal.

And when it comes to the V-chip, just 17% of those with chips in their sets report that they use them.

Surveyors found that about half of parents didn’t even know their new (or newish) sets contained them.

This is like using handcuffs but not locking them. The chip is what gives the ratings teeth.

Like carrying an umbrella in the car, it gives you an extra measure of protection at little cost in convenience or effort.

Using the onscreen menus, you just tell your television set to allow no programs rated worse than TVPG, for instance. And then you can turn it off just as easily when it’s time for you to watch “The Sopranos.”

That the V-chip is being ignored at such a rate affirms my belief that people are a lot more interested in complaining about television than they are in doing anything about it.

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Steve Johnson is television critic for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.