A Chip on the Shoulder

by Jan Strnad

All my liberal friends seem to hate the V-chip. I love it.

The V-chip, of course, is the federally-mandated integrated circuit that's going into all television sets sold in America. It uses the new Television Ratings System to allow viewers to filter out shows they might find objectionable. If you don't want your TV set to show programs rated TV-R, for example, you set your V-chip to filter them out.

The ratings system itself is in a state of flux, so we don't know exactly what kind of choices ultimately will be available to viewers, but a lot of people in "the industry" (meaning the television and motion picture industry) are up in arms over both the ratings system and the V-chip. They believe the ratings system and the V-chip to be the thin edge of the wedge that will lead to the federal government determining what we see and hear over our television sets.

I think the effect will be just the opposite, and I'm willing to go on record here with a prophecy: The V-chip will result in an unprecedented liberalization of television fare.

The anti-V-chip forces speak as if there were no filtering of television content going on right now. In fact, there's plenty. This filtering is familiar to viewers in the form of "time slots," and it happens invisibly to them since it occurs at the supply side of the pipeline and is controlled by the broadcasters.

Saturday morning is the children's time slot. Turn on the television set on Saturday morning and you'll find no broadcast programming that is unsuitable to children. You'll find kid shows and sports and maybe some news.

Through the week, early morning hours are still basically "kid friendly." Programming grows up a little bit when we hit the afternoon hours. The Family Hour in the early evening has different standards determining what can and can't be shown, the standards change after 8:00 p.m., again after 9:00, again after 10:00 p.m., and again very late at night.

You the viewer have no say over what goes into the pipeline during any of these time slots. The content is controlled by broadcasters operating under the scrutiny of federal watchdogs.

One major problem with filtering-via-time-slot is the assumption that every household in America conforms to an ideal that emerged during the Eisenhower administration. A "family" consists of one father who works out of the home from eight-to-five, one mother who stays home and bakes cookies, 2.5 kids, and everyone comes together to watch television as soon as the dinner dishes are washed and set out to dry. Or does it?

Ever go to a movie in the evening? To a restaurant? Shopping? Somebody's selling tickets and running the film projector, somebody's cooking the food and bringing it to your table, and somebody's minding all those mall stores. These people do not work 8-to-5.

Factories work two and three shifts. Hospitals don't close at five p.m. Hotels are open twenty-four hours a day. They all employ people who don't work 8-to-5.

Plus, some people have insomnia and are awake at strange hours, channel surfing. Many households include no children at all. And many include no spouses.

In fact, there are millions of people in America whose lives do not fit into the model assumed by filtering-via-time-slot. They may want to watch an R-rated movie on Saturday morning. They may want to turn on the set at 2:00 a.m. without getting barraged by sleaze. They may want to sit down in the early evening and watch Homocide before going to bed at nine. And they can't, because the filtering of programs has all been done "for" them by broadcasters according to a family model that has no relationship to their lives!

The V-chip puts the filtering of television content in the only place it belongs: at each individual's television set.

Flash forward to ten or fifteen years from now, when every pre-V television set currently in use has gone to Home Electronics Heaven and every television set in use contains a V-chip.

It's now possible (in this future world) for anything to enter the pipeline at any time of day or night, and if someone doesn't want to be exposed to it, they set their V-chip accordingly.

I'll readily admit that ratings systems, such as the Television Rating System that lies at the heart of the V-chip technology, are a pain in the neck to producers and creators, and that obtaining a desired rating can be a contentious, arbitrary, and frustrating experience. But you don't throw out a system with substantial benefits on the excuse that it falls short of perfection. Sometimes innocent people go to jail, for instance, but you don't scrap the entire criminal justice system because of it; you work on the system, refine it, build in safeguards, and try to make it better.

Any rating system is going to become a battleground for the eternal war between Marketing and Art. But rating systems do not create the war, any more than Normandy or Okinawa created World War II. This is a distinction that we have to keep in mind if we're going to advance beyond today's extremely narrow-minded system of filtering-by-time-slot.

Look at what we have now on broadcast television. Look at how censorious the current system is. Look at how pro-censorship, anti-choice groups are calling for bans on sex and violence on television. The Television Rating System and V-chip technology are ways to meet the mainstream public's need for information and an automatic means of using that information, which is bad news for the Far Right.

The Far Right wants far more in terms of censorship than the V-chip provides. They don't want mature content available to anyone of any age at any time. Fortunately we have the First Amendment to protect us from the Far Right, which it will do as long as the enemies of freedom are a small minority. They become a danger (as they did with the Congressional elections of 1994) only when they win the hearts of the mainstream. If the V-chip satisfies the mainstream, the Far Right is denied a powerful ally.

Movie producers and directors frequently complain, quite justifiably, about the movie rating system administered by the MPAA. Yes, the assignment of ratings is sometimes arbitrary, and creators sometimes don't get the rating they want without changing the movie. Yes, ratings have become factors in the marketing of films, so that studios may insist on a certain rating when they hire a director. And yes, NC-17 and X-rated movies are treated differently than the others by distributors...for their content, I hasten to point out, as indicated by the rating, not for the rating itself -- if there were no rating system, these movies would have even more distribution problems, probably receiving no distribution at all in some regions.

What critics of the MPAA rating system rarely acknowledge is that movies are far, far freer in terms of content than they were before the rating system was established. Before the rating system was adopted, legislation was pending in forty states that would have established State Film Review Boards that would determine which films could be exhibited in that state. If producers and directors think that dealing with the industry-run MPAA is a hassle, imagine producing fifty different cuts of a film to please fifty different State Film Review Boards. (Naturally, the studios wouldn't do this. They'd issue one cut that would satisfy the most conservative state criteria.)

The movie industry, operating under a rating system, is far more liberal in content than the broadcast television industry is. How often do you see the disclaimer "edited for television" before a movie broadcast on television? Which medium is more highly censored? Under the Hays Code - the code that determined movie content prior to the adoption of a rating system - movie content was as strictly limited as today's broadcast television programming is. The movie rating system was a liberalizing influence.

The basic flaw in arguments against a Television Rating System and the attendant V-chip is the assumption that current broadcast television is uncensored. Quite the contrary: It is highly censored, and it's censored at the supply end of the pipeline where the viewer has no control. The V-chip makes each individual his own "censor," putting control at the receiving end of the pipeline... where, if you still don't like the chip, you can elect to turn the darned thing off.