FCC Report - TV Violence Should be Regulated 346
tanman writes "CNN reports that a draft FCC report circulating on Capitol Hill 'suggests Congress could craft a law that would let the agency regulate violent programming much like it regulates sexual content and profanity — by barring it from being aired during hours when children may be watching' The article goes on to quote from studies showing a link between violent imagery and violence in life, and discusses the 'huge grey areas' that could result from ill-defined concepts of excessive violence." Government as Nanny, or cracking down on an excessive entertainment culture? Which side of this do you find yourself on?
Yes but no (Score:5, Informative)
So watching porn stops rape? (Score:1, Informative)
Seeing lots of violence normalises it. Hearing lots of fucking swearing normalises that too.
This is well documented. The idea that gaves and movies etc provide a harmless relief valve are completely without merit.
They want to stop KIDS from seeing it (Score:4, Informative)
I'm a grown-up man who has watched action movies all my life, and I am getting pretty sick of the violence. It sometimes seems like directors try to one-up each other with titillating depictions of evil and suffering.
I'm pretty sure mankind doesn't have an innate NEED to hurt each other despite what some psychologists hypothesized a hundred years ago - rather that it is a quick problem-"solving" (ego-scratching) solution that many stick to - and I'm pretty sure that if you expose people to violence all their lives they will become violent. Monkey see, monkey do.
Another interesting thing is that in Sweden we have only a fraction of the level of violent crimes as compared to USA. I don't think we are by nature a more docile people, it's rather probably the result of a lack of handguns and generations of limited media violence. And we haven't had a war in 200 years.
Re:Sex or violence? (Score:5, Informative)
Heh. I remember that once they had this commentary on some softporn show (might have been Playboy late night or something) about ads in Europe. The narrator was all fussed up "how can you actually remember the product when watching this commercial"....and it was a Rexona ad, with two women taking a shower after a workout in gym. I had seen that same ad and never thought there was anything sexual in it...but hey, being a Finn and frequently visiting a sauna I have never thought that nudity automatically implies sex.
Re:Limit or Ban? (Score:5, Informative)
As a libertarian this is better than worse, sadly (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Here's an idea (Score:2, Informative)
A great movie that explores this idea... (Score:5, Informative)
I just watched the movie This Film is Not Yet Rated. Kirby Dick does an amazing job opening up a peephole into the MPAA. He reveals to the audience that there is no formal criteria for what makes a PG movie a PG movie, and what makes it different from a PG-13 or an R-rated movie. (Although he does a hilarious Flash-like animation that describes the obvious differences between the ratings, but to the MPAA, there is no formal, published criteria.) The only judges who determine what rating a movie gets are people hired by the MPAA to sit in a room and judge for themselves, without any rules or guidelines to follow whatsoever. What bugs the movie industry so much is that this "process" is kept a complete secret to everyone, including movie producers, outside the MPAA, and no one is "supposed" to know who is on this panel of raters (though Kirby Dick uses a private investigator to discover who is on the panel, and reveals that to the audience).
The documentary does a fantastic job as well exposing the double-standard between rating sex and rating violence. Here's an interesting fact taken from the movie: if the producers of a movie ask for the aid and equipment of the US armed forces, military commanders require their personal screening of the movie before it is allowed to be distributed. If they find any objectionable content which they determine sheds the military in a bad light, they'll demand the content be pulled or edited, less the movie never sees the light of day.
I guess there are reasons for why we encourage our kids to watch violence.
V-chip (Score:3, Informative)
...
I do like the idea of perhaps dynamic self censorship.
pick what offends you and have a database of the schedules flagging what you want or don't want to see.
Its called a V chip here in the US. It picks up the rating flags the broadcasters send out with shows and can trigger a child-safety lock if it exceeds a level you set in the TVs configuration. To unlock it, you just use a PIN you set there too. Almost all cable boxes around here have the feature as well, and it was required by the FCC for all TVs over 13" made after Jan 1, 2000 to include them.
Tm
Aggression Literature (Score:2, Informative)
I would be interested to see who did the 'unpublished study' since it has not yet reached the publication stage. If this is a real causative finding, it would fly in the face of a fair number of prominent and well-skilled researchers. Needless to say, I am very skeptical of this study (and the subsequent FCC action).