Movie critic Richard Roeper of “Ebert & Roeper at the Movies” has a new video commentary up with some sensible thinking about the issue of regulating in-flight entertainment.
As I mentioned in this previous post, legislation has been proposed in the House of Representatives that would regulate “violent entertainment” shown on airline flights. Rep. Heath Shuler (D-NC) and several co-sponsors argue that a “Family Friendly Flights Act” is needed to protect kids from such fare while they are flying.
Roeper argues that “sometimes the content in these movies is a little too violent” and that the studios “should probably be a little more judicious in their editing.” But Roeper is generally against regulation and doesn’t think we need separate seating areas for kids on flights. He points out that adding another distinct seating section to airplane is just going to slow down boarding times. “It would be better if the studios themselves do a little bit better job cut[ting] the violent content so that kids don’t need to see people getting shot and car crashes and all that stuff, but let’s not get Congress involved.”
I agree. As I pointed out in an editorial for the City Journal a few months ago, it would be a mistake to empower federal regulators to become “Long-Range Censors” since many better alternatives to regulation exist.
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That bewildering title is my entire contribution to the discussion of the Australian government’s plan to filter the Internet. The 463 has a good write-up of this bad idea. The picture they’ve illustrated the post with alone makes it worth a visit.
The kids are alright. Not only is that the title of one of my favorite songs by The Who, but it also happens to be the theme of much of my public policy research. Specifically, I spend a great deal of time analyzing social trends and media usage in an attempt to show that, contrary to what many media critics claim, the whole world is not going to hell. I’ve touched on these themes before in essays such as “Why hasn’t violent media turned us into a nation of killers?” and my PFF paper about “Fact and Fiction in the Debate Over Video Game Regulation.”
In this research, I try to bring some hard evidence to bear on the question of whether there is any correlation between exposure to violent media and real world acts of violence / aggression. And I also try to show that parents are actually far more involved in raising their kids, and instilling good values in them, than critics care to admit. In essence, parents are parenting! I illustrate that in my ongoing book, Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods.” I keep that publication up to date with as much info as I can find on the subject and plan on issuing new versions of the report every few months. (Version 3.0 is due out early next year.)
Exhibit 1
And now I have some more great stats and charts to include in my report thanks to the release of a big batch of new Census Bureau data on child-parent interaction. The Census Bureau data, which is available here, is part of a report entitled A Child’s Day. The last report was conducted in 1994, and the most recent one in 2004, but the data for 2004 was just recently released.
The results are very encouraging and generally show that “Parents are taking a more active role in the lives of their children than they did 10 years ago,” according to the Census Bureau. For example, as Exhibit 1 above shows, parents are crafting more TV rules for the kids today than they were in the past.
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During the course of promoting the recent paper I co-wrote with Eli Lehrer, I have come across the same question/complaint from gamers: Why have two adult ratings, both M and AO, when seemingly they perform the same role?
The answer is that they don’t.
The key difference between M and AO is that M is sold in stores like Best Buy and Wal-Mart, while AO is not. This is analogous to movies. While both NC-17 movies and X movies are only available to adults, X rated movies are definitely not sold in Wal-Mart. Though this isn’t an official ESRB stance, most every retailer, large and small will not carry AO games if it sells games to a general audience.
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Matt Lasar has put together a very entertaining article illustrating how “Faux Celebrity FCC Filings [are] on the Rise.” What he’s referring to is the fact that just about anyone can file comments with the FCC, even fake celebrities or dead historical figures.
The whole process has become a complete joke. Some of my research on the FCC’s indecency complaint process has illustrated how one group–the Parents Television Council (PTC)–has essentially been able to stuff the complaint ballot box at the FCC by filing endless strings of computer-generated complaints from its website. The PTC then fires off letters to the FCC and Congress that essentially say, “Look! Millions of Americans out outraged by the content on TV and are clamoring for regulation!” In turn, that nonsense gets included in the congressional record when legislation is introduced, and politicians claim “the American people have spoken” and are overwhelming in favor of regulation.
It’s all nonsense, of course, because the vast majority of those “complaints” were just the same PTC form letter. But the same games are at work in the debates over media ownership policy and Net neutrality regulation. Jerry Brito and Jerry Ellig have shown that, in the FCC’s Net neutrality proceeding, “Close to 10,000 comments were submitted to the FCC, yet all but 143 were what the FCC calls “brief text comments,” many of which were form letters generated at the behest of advocacy groups.” The same thing is at work in the media ownership debate. A couple of radical anti-media activist groups stuff the ballot box with computer-generated complaints. And the Washington Post recently ran a piece raising questions about how the public filing process is potentially being abused in the XM-Sirius merger fight.
But Matt Laser documents how truly absurd this process has become when the likes of Paris Hilton, Donald Trump, Joseph Stalin, and even Jesus Christ end up submitting “comments” for the “public record.” Here’s some of the highlights from Lasar’s writeup:
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Today, CEI released a new paper by my colleague Eli Lehrer and me. The study, entitled Politically Determined Entertainment Ratings and How to Avoid Them, covers how we rate television, radio, comic books, movies, music, and video games. After studying the evolution of the ratings system for each medium, the report makes the following recommendations:
1. Keep politics out of ratings systems.
2. Know the medium being rated.
3. If a ratings system collapses, it is not a cause for concern.
4. Ratings systems will never substitute for other social institutions.
To check out a full copy of the report, visit CEI’s website. This report is especially important considering the renewed call for meddling with the ESRB system from Congressmen Baca (D-CA) and Wolf (R-VA). Check out more on that at Gamespot.
Thanks to GamePolitics.com for the awesome write-up on the report today and thanks to the readers as well for the 35 comments at the time of this post, all of which I read.
Do U.S. Internet companies "betray free speech"? A recent New York Times editorial believes so, and calls out Yahoo in particular for having a "gallingly backward understanding of the value of free expression." But the editorial missed the point, as my colleague Steve DelBianco spelled out in a letter-to-the-editor this past weekend:
Leading Internet companies want to do everything possible to
protect their customers, and several are working with human rights advocates to
develop ways to more effectively push back on the demands of repressive
regimes.
Despite your blithe assertion, however, these companies need
to abide by the laws of the land. These companies worry not only about
customers going to jail but also their own employees. For example, the head of
eBay India was arrested when a user posted an objectionable video to an eBay site.
The real question is as Steve asks: In a China
with no American content or online services, will the goals of free speech and
civil rights be better served? The answer should be an obvious and emphatic "No!"
We really don’t want our companies to get up and leave. Rather, we need a "playbook" of realistic
tactics online companies can use to effectively push back on government
demands for removing content or revealing user information.
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Benefits of computer games for kids evidently include learning how to deal with an attacking moose. Do follow the link and read the comments, too… I especially like “maybe his nub sister body pulled” and the comment to follow.
As I mentioned yesterday, James Gattuso and I penned an editorial for National Review this week about the growth of FCC regulation and spending in recent years. In the op-ed, we also noted that, “For whatever reason, a disproportionate number of these [new regulatory proposals] have been aimed at cable television, so much so that press and industry analysts now speak of Chairman Martin’s ongoing ‘war on cable.'”
Today, the editors at National Review have chimed in with an editorial of their own on the issue entitled, “Pulling the Cable on Martin’s Crusade.” Specifically, the editors address what most pundits believe really motivates the Chairman’s crusade against cable: His desire to force cable companies to offer consumers channels on “a la carte” basis in an effort to “clean up” cable TV. “Martin should abandon this particular crusade,” the NR editors argue. “While we are sympathetic to parents’ desire to get the channels they want without having to buy access to racier fare, using economic regulation to restructure an industry is the wrong approach.” They continue:
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.