With the release last month of its report on Violent Television Programming and Its Impact on Children, the FCC teed up the issue of regulating televised violence and tossed it over to Congress with a recommendation that lawmakers go ahead and swing for the fences. And Congress appears ready to oblige, although not necessarily in the way some at the FCC had originally envisioned.
You will recall that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin used the FCC’s violence report as another opportunity to engage in his monomaniacal, Moby Dick-like quest to impose a la carte regulation on cable and satellite operators. Martin argued that “Requiring cable and satellite television providers to offer programming in a more a la carte manner would be a more content neutral means for Congress to regulate violent programming and therefore would raise fewer constitutional issues.” But it doesn’t appear that the chairman is going to get his whale this time around.
Continue reading →
The FCC has just issued its long-awaited report on Violent Television Programming and Its Impact on Children. Unsurprisingly, it recommends that the government should assume a great role in regulating the video content that comes into our homes. The agency concludes that: “We believe that further action to enable viewer-initiated blocking of violent television content would serve the government’s interests in protecting the well-being of children and facilitating parental supervision and would be reasonably likely to be upheld as constitutional.” (p. 15)
Ambiguity Defined
Ironically, however, the FCC’s report goes on to undercut its own argument for regulation again and again because of the stunning level of ambiguity surrounding everything they propose. For example, in the second paragraph of the report, the FCC notes that “A broad range of television programming aired today contains [violent] content, including, for example, cartoons, dramatic series, professional sports such as boxing, news coverage, and nature programs.” Is the agency saying such things could be regulated? They never tell us.
Or consider the endless number of questions raised by this paragraph on pages 20-21:
We believe that developing an appropriate definition of excessively violent programming would be possible, but such language needs to be narrowly tailored and in conformance with judicial precedent. Any definition would need to be clear enough to provide fair warning of the conduct required. A definition sufficient to give notice of upcoming violent programming content to parents and potential viewers could make use of, or be a refinement of, existing voluntary rating system definitions or could make use of definitions used in the research community when studying the consequences of violent programming. For more restrictive time channeling rules, a definition based on the scientific literature discussed above, which recognizes the factors most important to determining the likely impact of violence on the child audience, could be developed. For example, such a definition might cover depictions of physical force against an animate being that, in context, are patently offensive. In determining whether such depictions are patently offensive, the Government could consider among other factors the presence of weapons, whether the violence is extensive or graphic, and whether the violence is realistic. (p. 20-21)
Let’s try to unpack some of this because defining “excessive violence” is really the core of this debate.
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.