PTA Stresses Shared Responsibility Across Industries to Protect Children from Harmful Effects of Media

In response to a recent House Subcommittee hearing on “Images Kids See on the Screen,” the PTA calls for a joint effort amongst parents, educators, the entertainment industry, and government to protect children from the harmful effects of media, while citing a recent study that shows parents do not use current tools to help parents.

At Friday’s House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet hearing on “Images Kids See on the Screen,” several witnesses continued to espouse the belief that parents have a myriad of “wonderful” tools to help them choose what their children do and do not watch. Recent studies and even a casual glance at children’s television programming shows that these beliefs do not reflect reality for most parents.

In their most recent study, Parents, Children & Media, released this past Tuesday, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that among all parents, only 16% say they have ever used the V-Chip. Eight out of ten parents (82%) say they have purchased a new television since 2000, when the requirement that all TVs over 13” be equipped with a V-Chip went into effect, but more than half (57%) of those parents aren’t even aware that they have a V-Chip. And though 44% of parents say they have other parental controls on their TV through their cable or satellite company that allow them to block certain channels (they do not allow the user to block based on a show’s rating), only one in four parents say they’ve used these other types of parental controls.

The Kaiser Family Foundation’s research found that only three in ten parents (30%) with children ages 2-6 can name any of the ratings used for children’s shows and only 11% of parents of children in this age group could identify TV-Y and TV-Y7, the ratings specific to children’s programming. Further, only 1 in 10 parents knew that the rating “FV” stands for “fantasy violence,” the same number of parents that think it means “family viewing.”

A rating system is not understandable or usable when 98% of parents cannot identify that a “D” rating stands for suggestive/sexual dialogue, when 64% cannot identify that “S” stands for sexual content/situations, or when 49% cannot identify that “V” stands for violent content. A rating system is not effective when half of all parents have never used them, only one-quarter use them often, and of the half that use them, 50% find them to be only “somewhat useful,” “not too useful,” or “not at all useful.” In addition, a rating system is not easily understood, usable and effective when, as the Parent’s Television Council’s recent study The Ratings Sham II details, television ratings are not applied consistently among individual networks’ programming, let alone between networks.

The PTA does not condone the censorship of media but believes that we all – parents, educators, the entertainment industry, and government – share a responsibility to protect children from the harmful effects of media, while also supporting the use of media to enrich their education. The television industry has failed to do their part in protecting the nation’s children. The current rating system falls far short of what consumers deserve and parents require.

We call on broadcasters and cable providers to work with the PTA and other public interest groups to develop a comprehensive, easily recognizable and understood rating system with guidelines applied across all network and cable stations. We call on the television industry to introduce blocking technology that is incorporated easily with existing televisions and simple to program. Those in the television industry have had years to make self-regulation work, and their efforts have fallen far short of that goal. PTA prefers to see the television industry self-regulate, however, if the television industry cannot make a dramatic turnaround with concrete benchmarks that demonstrate progress quickly, Congress is fully justified in stepping in.

If the television industry is serious about providing parents with truly effective tools, it will work with PTA to create, implement, and promote aggressively a rating system that is clear, and applied consistently across all network and cable stations.

Regardless of options in channel choice, without effective tools including blocking technology and a high-quality, industry wide rating system, parents will continue to struggle to protect their children from exposure to that which they deem unsuitable.