Violent Entertainment Not Priority

Congress’ campaign against children’s access to violent entertainment, ignited by the Columbine High School shootings of 1999, appears to have run out of gas before achieving all its goals.

In Congress, terrorism and the recession have pushed concerns about entertainment into the background. Even some top enforcers, including Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), are backing off for now.

“It’s definitely a different climate from a year ago--with many of the reasons having to do with the war,” said Lieberman spokesman Dan Gerstein.

Also contributing were concessions by the industry after a September 2000 Federal Trade Commission report uncovered embarrassing entertainment industry practices for marketing violence specifically to children.

Lawmakers forced television networks to adopt a system for rating shows according to sex and violence. They shamed Hollywood into cutting back on marketing violence to children.

In a report released Wednesday as a follow-up to its scathing report of a year ago, the FTC gave credit to the movie and video game industries for targeting children far less often in their advertising, but chastised the music industry for continued intransigence.

How long the issue of violent entertainment will stay off Congress’ agenda is uncertain. Just as the shooting deaths of 15 people--including the suicides of the two gunmen--and the wounding of 26 more at Colorado’s Columbine High School touched off the recent round of Hollywood-bashing, so could another such episode trigger a reappraisal of whether violent entertainment is producing violent kids.

Many in the industry say they remain easy targets for campaigning politicians. They say they can tell how close the next election is by measuring the vehemence of Congress’ assault.

Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, said he’s been around too long to believe the issue is gone for good.

“I think it never goes away,” Valenti said. “Going back to 1922, if you read stuff from that era, it was an issue even then.”

Valenti said the current pause stems in part from the White House’s reaching out to the movie and TV industries for help in the war on terrorism.

In this atmosphere, he said, the White House “has not seen fit to criticize us.”

The lessons taken from the latest round are likely to stick in the memories of politicians, artists and the businesspeople who make fortunes selling popular culture.

* The Republican presidential victory let Hollywood off the hook. The Democratic ticket of Al Gore and Lieberman had vowed to hold the entertainment industry accountable, a promise Lieberman has since struggled to uphold from the Senate.

Concerns that Lynne V. Cheney, the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney and former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, might take the industry to task have proven unfounded. Despite pressure from social conservatives, President Bush has shown no appetite for condemning popular culture.

* Defiance works. Invoking free-speech protections and standing its ground at a series of bruising Capitol Hill hearings, the music industry emerged little the worse for wear.

The fight over music lyrics veered into a discussion of racial bias, with some prominent black artists questioning why so much of the FTC-cited material was either hip-hop or rap. As one music executive said to The Times, why is it all right for Johnny Cash to sing about shooting a man “just to watch him die” but not for Snoop Dogg to recount tales of urban violence?

* Legislative threats backfire. A bill offered by Lieberman this year would have imposed steep fines on entertainment companies that violate their own voluntary marketing guidelines.

The result: The music industry abandoned promises to enact industrywide ratings and marketing guidelines. And Valenti said he would advise movie companies to drop the ratings system he helped create more than 30 years ago if the bill became law.

* Few step up to the plate. Despite deep misgivings about some of what comes out of Hollywood, few lawmakers--conservative, liberal or anywhere in between--want to be seen as censors. Even Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), among Hollywood’s fiercest critics, declined to sign on to Lieberman’s bill.

Still, as Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) warned at a hearing this year, times can change.

Thompson cautioned music industry executives that public opinion could push lawmakers to act if the industry continued to ignore the concerns of parents, even though the prospect made him uneasy.

When FTC investigators combed through Hollywood’s marketing plans last year for their report on the selling of violence to children, they uncovered schemes few in the industry had the appetite to defend: R-rated films screened by Girl Scout troops; commercials on the morning cartoon shows for films featuring murder and mayhem; ads in Nickelodeon magazine for music labeled “explicit-content.”

Aside from the most obvious abuses, however, music industry executives argued forcefully that some alleged abuses were a matter of personal taste.

“They say, ‘My God, you’re marketing this on [MTV’s “Total Request Live”]?’ The response is, ‘So what?’ That’s who the audience is for it,” said Danny Goldberg, former chairman of Mercury Records who now runs independent label Artemis Records.

“And if you never want your kids exposed to certain kinds of music, you shouldn’t have them watch MTV. God knows there are differences in the country about language, but that’s nothing the law can deal with. Those are choices made by families.”

Goldberg said he doubted the Recording Industry Assn. of America guidelines calling for the parental-advisory logo to appear in advertising for explicit albums made any difference.

“I don’t think it changed, by one iota, who heard dirty words,” he said. “I just don’t really believe there are parents who can honestly say they were unaware of the nature of the content of a [rapper] DMX record or something.”

Even the focus of Congress’ inquiry--whether mature-rated products were being deceptively marketed to children--indicated Washington’s cloudy authority over Hollywood.

Because the 1st Amendment puts artistic content off-limits to lawmakers, they had to attack from another angle: advertising.

Signs soon appeared that federal regulators believed the government had little recourse beyond the bully pulpit.

In a letter written two months after the original report came out, the FTC chairman told Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), then chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, that a “careful review” of the law had led him to believe there were “significant legal limitations, including substantial and unsettled constitutional questions,” to any FTC enforcement over Hollywood.

That opinion, industry insiders say, cleared the way for resistance to some of the demands put on them by Congress, allowing them to say no to proposals such as universal ratings and marketing guidelines.

Unlike cigarettes and alcohol, both of which are illegal to sell to minors, entertainment content is protected by the 1st Amendment. Societal convention, not the law, dictates that an R-rated movie is inappropriate for children.

“Keep in mind the ratings system is voluntary itself,” Valenti said. “Nobody has to participate. That’s what gives it its great strength in legal cases. We’re doing this because we believe we have a civic obligation.”

*

Times staff writer Jeff Leeds in Los Angeles contributed to this report.