TV Networks Find Ways to Stretch Educational Rules

Parents, heads up: NBC is offering your children an educational opportunity this morning. It’s called “NBA: Inside Stuff,” and it teaches “peaceful conflict resolutions and global awareness.”

Or maybe they’ve already caught the Saturday morning music videos that a San Francisco station says give children an appreciation for the “multicultural aspect of music and the world around them.”

Of course, there’s also the syndicated show “Kids ‘N Motorsports,” where youngsters can pick up information about “technical advances, engines, clutches . . . and basic nuts-and-bolts facts.”

This isn’t exactly what Congress had in mind 12 years ago when it passed the Children’s Television Act, requiring all local TV stations to provide educational programming for children 16 and younger.

But these examples, culled from federal regulatory records, reflect the new economic realities of children’s television.

Broadcasters and their advertisers see educational programming as the TV equivalent of leafy green vegetables. They’re being force fed a restriction that drains profits. Young viewers are leaving in droves, finding better fare, whenever they want, on their cable menus.

Increasingly, the only thing keeping the major networks in children’s programming is the federal requirement that their stations air three hours a week of educational programming.

Critics say that’s hardly a burden; yet broadcasters are still fudging the rules. In recent weeks, the debate over the finances and obligations of TV stations has intensified. The reason: Fox recently sold four hours of its Saturday morning TV time for $25 million a year to a company that will air animated programs designed to sell toys. Left undecided is how and when the network plans on fulfilling the federal rule.

NBC also auctioned its Saturday morning time because children’s programming had become too unprofitable. NBC’s slots went to Discovery Networks, which will supply the educational shows. The sale illustrates the dynamics of the marketplace. NBC got $8 million, a fraction of the amount Fox made by attaching few educational strings to its buyer.

“Most parents would say that three hours a week is a pretty paltry price for broadcasters to pay for a free license and the right to make millions of dollars from programs throughout the week,” said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who sponsored the Children’s Television Act. “Is three hours too big a price for them to serve the public interest and our children?”

A University of Pennsylvania study in 1999 by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that a fifth of all programs billed as educational for children had “little or no educational value” and failed to meet Federal Communications Commission standards.

And that’s bad news, according to another study. Georgetown University found that children exposed to educational television shows had higher academic achievement than children who did not watch such shows.

Officials at the FCC, which regulates and licenses broadcasters, say enforcement of the rule is tricky because there is no single definition of what constitutes an educational show.

The rule simply requires that broadcast stations air “any television programming that furthers the educational and informational needs of children . . . in any respect, including the child’s intellectual/cognitive or social/emotional needs.”

Because of the rule’s inherent subjectivity, the agency does not police the content of the shows the stations say satisfy the rule, said Barbara Kreisman, chief of the FCC’s video services division, which oversees enforcement of the rule.

“We don’t like to get involved with issues of quality,” she said. “We defer to the judgment of broadcasters, and we rely upon parents to monitor.”

Cable Exempt From FCC Rules

No station has ever been challenged for not complying with the rules. Nor has any station’s license been denied during the renewal of its license. The law does not apply to cable channels because they do not use public airwaves to transmit their signals.

One key reason the rule remains on the books is that an estimated 20% of the 100 million U.S. households with TVs do not subscribe to cable or satellite service.

“There are a lot of poor kids who don’t have cable,” said Sandra Calvert, a Georgetown University psychology professor who has studied the effect of children’s television. “[Network] broadcasters have a greater responsibility to the public.”

The debate over children’s television has been a seesaw saga that dates back to the early days of television.

In the late 1940s--when TV was a novelty, not a multibillion-dollar business--many children’s shows aired without commercials.

By the mid-1960s, networks realized there was money to be made by clumping together low-cost animated cartoons on Saturday mornings. Soon they were loaded with commercials for toys, Coco Puffs and Flintstone’s Chewable Vitamins.

At the time, federal codes allowed no more than 9 1/2 minutes per hour of commercial advertisements during prime time. But there were no restrictions on Saturday mornings.

In 1968, a group of Boston moms banded together as the watchdog Action for Children’s Television to push for reforms and fewer commercials. They lobbied, filed petitions and brought lawsuits, forcing the television industry to come up with a series of standards or face tougher regulation by the government.

This breathed life into the production of a raft of such weekday educational shows as PBS’ “Sesame Street” and ABC’s “After School Special.”

More rules were on the way, until the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, who favored less Washington regulation. His administration said the marketplace would respond to children’s needs.

But that didn’t happen, according to a UC Santa Barbara study at the time, which found that commercial broadcasters did not provide a single educational show during a sample week in the Greater Los Angeles area. Another regulatory movement was born, but not without a fight.

“The networks argued all throughout the ‘80s that children’s programming wasn’t their job or that it was too expensive,” Markey said. “They argued that they couldn’t make as much money when they made programs that were educational.”

Although Congress passed the Children’s Television Act in 1990, controversy erupted again when stations soon began saying that the “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” illustrated how good can triumph over evil. An Ohio station, meanwhile, said a “Phil Donahue” episode was educational. It was about teenage strippers.

As a result, the FCC in 1996 was pushed to tighten the standards and adopted the three-hour rule.

“The networks have never really been interested in serving the interests of children,” said Peggy Charren, the Boston grandmother who began the national crusade for better children’s programming 34 years ago.

The problem for broadcasters, industry experts say, is that with the rise of cable, children are no longer the captive Saturday morning audience they were even a decade ago.

“It was a pretty healthy business for everyone to be in,” said Lee Gaither, NBC’s vice president for family entertainment. “You had a pie with four pieces, but now that pie is split into eight pieces.”

When the Children’s Television Act became law, more than half of all kids watching Saturday morning TV were tuned into the four major networks--ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox. By last year, the number had dropped to 26%, according to Nielsen Media Research.

The Saturday morning ritual of cartoons and Lucky Charms has been shelved by an inexhaustible supply of children’s shows on cable every day, around the clock. Why wait for Saturday when there’s Nick all the time?

The way CBS and ABC are weathering the changes is to turn to their parent companies, which have vast production and distribution operations for children’s shows.

Viacom Inc., which owns CBS, also owns Nickelodeon. Walt Disney Co., meanwhile, owns ABC and the Disney Channel. Both conglomerates use their popular educational shows to fill their Saturday morning network lineups.

Fox and NBC do not have similar corporate girdings to prop them up. They’ve turned elsewhere for their fall lineups.

Fox’s Hold on Kids’ Shows Drops

Fox, once the leader in children’s programming, now has the lowest Saturday morning ratings.

When the network launched its children’s programming in 1990, it saw an opening to provide shows during the week, not just on Saturday, as the other networks were doing.

But then came the onslaught of alternatives.

“By about 1995, I was starting to look over my shoulder and worry about cable,” said Margaret Loesch, founding president of Fox Kids Networks who later started the Hallmark Channel. “The landscape was already starting to change.”

Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., began buying stations whose revenue was driven by local news shows, forcing the network to drop children’s programs from their late-afternoon slots.

“Kids’ programming had been a wonderful business for Fox for a while,” Loesch said. “But they found that children and news were incompatible.”

Tony Vinciquerra, president of the Fox Television Network, said the network can no longer afford to compete against the 24-hour children’s channels on cable.

“The kids’ television business has changed dramatically,” Vinciquerra said. “It’s a multimedia approach to get these kids interested in these programs.

Fox, NBC Auction Programming Block

And who better to understand the whims of children than 4Kids Entertainment, a New York toy-licensing company that made more than $100 million from Pokemon? In a dramatic move, Fox leased its Saturday morning block in January to 4Kids for $25.3 million a year for up to six years.

In return, 4Kids snagged a four-hour national platform to promote its new toys and video games. And if 4Kids can produce a program that launches another Pokemon, $25 million will seem like chump change.

“Look at the opportunities that we have and the amount we would have had to pay for a network,” said Joe Garrity, 4Kids’ chief operating officer. “We have exactly the piece we want: Saturday mornings, prime time for kids.”

He added: “We’re in the entertainment business, not education.”

So far Fox is requiring 4Kids to provide only 30 minutes of the three hours of the FCC’s educational requirement. Network executives say they aren’t sure yet when the rest of the shows will air or what those shows might be.

“The equation is turning back to the early ‘80s, when broadcasters were more interested in making money rather than providing quality programming,” said Herb Scannell, president of Nickelodeon.

NBC, owned by General Electric Co., teamed up with Discovery Networks because it was concerned about the educational rule and about preserving its image, according to NBC executive Gaither.

“The Fox-4Kids deal is basically the reason why the three-hour rule exists,” Gaither said. “You’ve got a network saying we’re going to put four hours of toy commercials on the air and that’s OK.”