When I speak out about the rising tide of sex and violence in our popular culture and the harmful influence it is having on our children and our country, I am often asked by parents what they can do to stop it.
My answer is the same one that the television industry typically offers -- turn it off. Don't watch violent, vulgar, or degrading programs. Set rules for your children's viewing and enforce them.
But I also encourage parents to pick it up -- the telephone, that is. I urge them to call their local television station, or even the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) -- 888-225-5322 -- to voice their dissatisfaction with the damaging messages flooding into their homes.
Many parents skeptically and understandably ask what good that will do. They are convinced that television programmers won't listen to them.
The reason parents' complaints can have an effect on television broadcasters is that they have to listen. Local television stations have a legal obligation to serve the public interest and their specific communities. That is the commitment they make in exchange for free access to the public airwaves. And it is the FCC's job to enforce that compact.
To remind people about this point, I recently joined with Senator John McCain (R-AZ) in
sending a letter to the FCC voicing our concerns about the degrading of the public interest standard. We asked a simple yet provocative question: Is the public interest being served by the glut of crud currently on the air?
Consider first the amount of violence on network and local broadcast television. Under pressure from a complaining public, broadcasters have modestly reduced the gratuitous murder and mayhem in prime time, and implemented a rating system to work with the V-chip. Yet on-air violence remains pervasive and excessive. In fact, according to a study by the Center of Media and Public Affairs, first-run syndicated programs averaged 37 violent acts per episode during the 1998-99 season.
Matters are worse when it comes to sexual content. As even the casual viewer has noticed, there has been an explosion of crude, rude, and lewd material in prime time. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that 67 percent of all network prime-time shows during the 1997-98 season contained talk about sex or sexual behavior, averaging 5.3 scenes with sex per hour; nearly one in 10 shows depicted or strongly implied copulation; 77 percent of all prime-time sitcoms contained sexual content, with those shows averaging nearly 6.7 scenes with sex per hour; 85 percent of all soap opera episodes contained sexual content, with an average of 4.4 scenes with sex per hour.
In the former "family hour" -- the first hour of prime time -- sexual references have now reached an average of 3.69 per hour, according to a study by the Parents Television Council (PTC). That's a 77 percent increase in 18 months. In 10 years, the amount of sexual material in prime time has increased by more than 300 percent, while the use of crude language increased by more than 500 percent.
It's not just the quantity but the quality of the dialogue and the depictions that is so troubling. As the Kaiser and PTC studies have clearly documented, the sexual references and behaviors have become far more graphic and explicit. Even worse, they are usually shown without moral content or social guideposts. In most cases, sex is treated as a recreational activity with little consideration of consequences or connection to love or marriage. The Kaiser "Sex on TV" study found that only one in nine prime-time network shows (and only 3 percent of sitcoms) with sexual content include any reference to risk or responsibility.
A number of leading child development experts have raised serious concerns about the cumulative impact of these messages on our children. As far back as 1982, the National Institutes of Health declared television to be an "important sex educator." Since then, other studies "consistently point to a relationship between exposure to sexual content and sexual beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors," says University of North Carolina Professor Jane Brown, a leading expert in this field.
That connection was reflected in an eye-opening article in the New York Times earlier this year. The Times cited studies, researchers, and interviews with children to show that a disturbingly high number of pre-adolescents are engaging in sex. One of those studies, reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that 17 percent of seventh- and eighth-graders said they had already had sexual relations. In trying to explain this trend, experts frequently cite the alluring sexual messages the culture is raining down on children. And the young teens who were interviewed said much the same thing. One 13-year-old Manhattan boy traced his desire to have sex to watching Fox's Beverly Hills 90210 on television as a third-grader. "I was interested," he said. "The people were cool. I wanted to try what they were doing on the show."
Critics have repeatedly asked the networks to recognize this potential for harm and to tone down the sexual content of the programming when large numbers of children are in the audience. The industry has for the most part responded by denying that there is a problem. But some network officials have admitted that their programming strategy is to increase the sex and vulgarity quotient in order to compete with the racier fare on HBO and other cable networks. Their goal is to attract their desired younger and ideally male audience -- a strategy that is often euphemistically referred to as "pushing the envelope."
This "anything goes" attitude is a far cry from the profession of responsibility made by broadcasters through the old National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) TV Code, the industry's vehicle for self-regulation for three decades. The NAB code acknowledged that television requires "exceptional awareness of considerations peculiar to the medium... [I]n selecting program subjects and themes, great care must be exercised to be sure that the treatment and presentation are made in good faith and not for the purpose of sensationalism or to shock or exploit the audience or appeal to prurient interests or morbid curiosity."
The code went on to state that broadcasters have a "special responsibility" to children.
"In the course of a child's development, numerous social factors and forces, including television, affect the ability of the child to make the transition to adult society... Because children are allowed to watch programs designed primarily for adults, broadcasters should take this practice into account in the presentation of material in such programs when children may constitute a substantial segment of the audience."
The denials and excuses we routinely hear today from the industry raise serious doubts about the seriousness of many broadcasters in fulfilling their legal obligation to serve the public interest. Broadcasters are trustees of a public resource worth billions of dollars, which they get for free, in return for a pledge to act as responsible stewards of the airwaves. The license they receive is a legally binding contract, an especially important one given television's immense influence on our children and our culture. Yet the evidence I outlined above strongly suggests that many licensees, along with their network parents, are breaching this public trust, and harming rather than serving the public interest.
That is why Senator McCain and I called on the FCC to initiate a broad re-examination of the public interest standard and the license renewal process -- to determine if in fact the broadcasters are serving "the public interest, convenience and necessity" (as the law requires) or whether the standard of service we expect of them needs to be strengthened. The FCC has already opened an inquiry on the broader question of the public interest obligations for the new digital television licenses that local stations have received. Our letter asked the commission to include the concerns we raised about programming standards as part of its deliberations.
We also asked the FCC to consider the merits of resurrecting an industry-adopted code of conduct to protect against the further erosion of broadcasting standards and to provide a broader platform for self-regulation. This idea, beyond having a long-standing and practical precedent, enjoys broad bipartisan support. Last year both the House and Senate overwhelmingly approved strong legislation encouraging the industry to re-adopt a voluntary code. And the commission the President appointed to advise us on the public interest obligations for digital broadcasters -- which included several leading industry executives -- unanimously endorsed the idea as well.
In our letter, we recognized that there are many good, socially responsible broadcasters and many good, socially responsible programs. Even when they touch on difficult or disturbing issues, these programs usually manage to put them into a responsible context and in the end enlighten us. They prove that broadcasters can air sophisticated, adult-oriented programming without violating the old
NAB code's admonition against appealing to "prurient interests or morbid curiosity." And they have shown that they can do so while being sensitive to audience makeup; the networks typically broadcast the programs I'm talking about at 10 p.m., when fewer children are watching.
Sadly, those select programs, along with much of what broadcasters honorably do in their communities, are being overshadowed and overwhelmed by the on-air abundance
of gratuitous sex and violence. The threat posed by the accumulated impact of these messages would be consequential at any moment, but it is especially so now, when children are gunning down their classmates and teachers and our country is plagued by
an epidemic of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
The evidence is so compelling, and the risks to our children are so serious, that we are obliged to ask whether the broadcasters are fulfilling their public trust. We hope that parents, grandparents, educators, and other citizens who share these concerns will ask the same question, and thereby help us engage the television industry in an honest dialogue about its legal and societal responsibilities. In the end, there is no better guardian of the public interest than the public itself.
