Violence, Industry Stance on

Concerns about violence on television are as old as television itself. The television industry, mindful of the need for advertising revenue driven by high ratings, has typically downplayed the effects of violent programming.

The industry's response to early congressional hearings on the topic in the 1950s was to point out the lack of research conclusively establishing a causal relationship between such programming and harm in viewers and to add that any studies conducted under industry auspices would be assumed to be biased, thereby placing the burden of proof elsewhere.

When the U.S. Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior was formed in the mid-1960s, with the goal of funding research projects on the effects of television violence, the networks and National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) vetoed the inclusion of many of the researchers considered best qualified to serve. They also challenged the validity of the committee's finding that it had evidence of a causal relation between viewing violence on television and aggressive and antisocial behavior.

When legislators attempted a solution in the 1970s by pressing broadcasters to adopt into their industry code a nightly family viewing hour, a period during which sexual and violent programming would not air, the concept was hotly contested by some broadcasters and was not always honored. In the mid-1980s, Senator Paul Simon proposed legislation that would grant broadcasters an antitrust exemption to meet to discuss joint solutions to the issue. However, the only industry action in which the 3-year antitrust exemption resulted was an agreement to fund a study conducted by independent researchers that would monitor the levels of violence in programming; the study, the National Television Violence Study, found no significant reduction in the amount of violence on television.

In 1982, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) issued a report that concluded that children learn violent behaviors from television, that heavy television viewers were more fearful and less trusting than light viewers, and that the amount of violence on television had remained consistently high through the years. The broadcast industry tried to challenge the NIMH report, with ABC publishing its own report attacking the findings point by point.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 made it a law that all TVs with a 13-inch or larger screen sold after a certain date be equipped with a V-chip device, and it gave the industry a year to voluntarily create a rating system to work with the V-chip. Industry leaders appointed Jack Valenti, who had helped establish ratings for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), to head its implementation group, which was composed largely of executives from the major broadcast and cable networks. The group ignored parents' well-documented pleas for a content-based system, in which specific information is given about what type of content (e.g., sex, violence) a program contains, and instead implemented an age-based system, where parents are given a general guideline about how old a child should be to watch a certain program. Numerous citizens groups filed critical comments with the Federal Communications Commission, and the vocal opposition caused the industry to reconsider its stance, agreeing in 1997 to modify the system by, in some instances, accompanying the six age-based categories with content descriptors. The industry used the revision as a bargaining chip to procure a moratorium on further changes to the system to give it a chance to work, and NBC refused to go along with the use of the supplementary content ratings.

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