FCC Report - TV Violence Should be Regulated

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

[Turn-X Alphonse]

I'd say that there needs to be some censorship in this area, but it needs to be well defined like it is here in the UK. You can show violence, sex and whatever else you like AFTER 9pm, up until 9pm you have to keep it tame. This means people can still show anything they like but parents have a fairly good idea of what will be involved after the watershed (9pm).

So watching porn stops rape?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

What BS.

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

[MichailS]

not adults. So keep your knee-jerks in check. You will get to see your gore, only late at night.

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?

[Zarhan]

USians demand right for ultra-violence in media, get upset about female anatomy being shown (e.g. Janet Jackson's boob on tv). Europeans get upset about kids getting exposed to violence

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?

[Watson Ladd]

The FCC is not illegal. The airwaves are a public resource, and the goverment can make any rules they want about the type of content that can be distributed over them.

As a libertarian this is better than worse, sadly

[JymmyZ]

Alright, I haven't read all the comments, so I hope I'm not just repeating what someone else says (I doubt it, the quality of posts around here has been weak for a while) I'm normally all for libertarianism, the government should stay the hell out of how I live my life, until it starts affecting the lives of other. But I think I have to admit that I might side with the "censorship" side of things on this one. Sadly, WAY too many people use TV to babysit, and I really don't see why we need to highlight violence when there's healthier and, well I guess, better things to highlight with the power TV has. Sex and love and doing what you can to help your fellow man aren't intrinsically void of good plots, and they can certainly lead to great ideas and stories that could help guide the impressionable to make our nations really great again. It's a shame that the people who come up with the drivel on TV, with the real power of thought-control they have, waste it on the crap that's fed to us. There are a few smart shows out there, but most of it just helps feed negative messages to the viewers, feeds that consumerist need, and leads to a wasteful life. If suggestions (sadly in the form of legal controls) from the government can help reduce negative images and (hopefully) encourage more positive thoughts in viewers then I'm forced to agree with their doing so. But of course this "censorship" will likely be politically motivated in some way or another and won't serve any purpose but that of the people who want to enact such a law, and it'll just further fuck up an already sick nation. I guess that's the reason I'm against governments sticking their grubby hands in places they shouldn't be.

Re:Here's an idea

[Chysn]

Parents are the most important part of regulating children's viewing. Not just the content, but the amount of TV should be regulated by parents. My young son has a TV in his room, and I have the V-Chip set to block pretty much everything but TV-Y and TV-G programming without violence. But every so often, 24 comes on at 8:00. Now, I love 24. And I, as an adult, choose to watch it. But I don't want my little kids seeing it. And the oldest of them is still awake at 8:00pm. I don't begrudge the violence in 24, or the right of the producers to create programming with that level of violence. But does it have to be on at 8:00? Of course, it also bugs me that they casually use mild profanities on the TV Guide Channel at ALL hours. I mean, I'm trying to see what's on TV while my kids are in the room and they've got programming in the top half of the screen that says "damn," "ass," and "bitch." What's with that? Why do I need to mute the damn bitch-ass TV Guide Channel? That's another thread.

A great movie that explores this idea...

[Pollux]

It's funny you say that because I've always thought it was funny that you couldn't show a nipple on TV, but you could show a bomb going off and killing people in a crowded hospital or somebody getting shot.

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

[Tmack]

The simplest solution with digital broadcasts woiuld be an age rating flag. let the user set the level they want to recieve and blank the channel when it exceeds thier set rating.

...

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

[drcoppersmith]

I study the neuroscience of aggression (if you're interested in that sort of thing: see my blog [drcoppersmith.com]), and there are no studies to date showing a causative link between watching violence as a child and being violent as an adult. There seems to be strong correlative evidence to that end, but those studies are all so confounded and convoluted, they're hard (or impossible) to interpret and fit in with what we know about the underlying neurobiology.
 
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).