In a recent PFF paper I argued that “We Are Living in the Golden Age of Children’s Programming,” and showed how, despite incessant complaints by many policymakers:

the overall market for family and children’s programming options continues to expand quite rapidly. Thirty years ago, families had a limited number of children’s television programming options at their disposal on broadcast TV. Today, by contrast, there exists a broad and growing diversity of children’s television options from which families can choose.

I then documented there and in my book, Parental Controls & Online Child Protection:

• the many excellent family- or child-oriented networks available on cable, telco, and satellite television today;
• the growing universe of religious / spiritual television networks;
• the many family or educational programs that traditional TV broadcasters offer; or
• the massive market for interactive computer software or Internet websites for children.

And every time I turn around I find another great show, service, or site for families to choose from.  Earlier today I highlighted the excellent new online video search service, Clicker.com, which is essentially a “TV Guide for the Internet.”  It is absolutely awesome and I highly recommend you play with it. You’ll be instantly hooked if you are TV junkie.

Better yet, Clicker.com offers a wonderful compendium of kid- and family-oriented video programming options. Although the site is still fairly new, you can already find 660 shows and almost 5,000 unique episodes of kids programming there.  A lot of it is just good ‘ol fashion couch potato fare ranging from the old (The Jetsons, Fat Albert, The Flintstones, etc) to the new stuff that you’d find on various cable channels today.  But there’s also plenty of wonderful educational programming to be found on Clicker including shows like Arthur, Sesame Street (over 1,000 episodes), Martha Speaks, The Electric Company, Animal Exploration with Jarod Miller, Jonathan Bird’s Blue World, Postcards From Buster, Science on Brain Pop, Technology on Brain Pop, and more.

Although my kids aren’t really into TV, as they grow older, I bet they’ll be watching a lot more programming via services like Clicker.  Currently, my kids enjoy watching snippets of video via kid-oriented online search portals like KidZui and Glubble.  Such online walled gardens offer a safe place for parents to find terrific online content for their kids.   Bottom line: compared to the miserable state of affairs some of us faced growing up in the 1970s, kids and parents have never had it better in terms of the video programming options at their disposal.

Anyway, some of “kid-vid” issues — including potential expansion of the Children’s Television Act of 1990 — could be up for discussion in the FCC’s new proceeding, “Empowering Parents and Protecting Children in an Evolving Media Landscape” (MB Docket 09-194).  The FCC just tweeted about it here and I posted my thoughts on where the agency might be heading in this proceeding in this post last month.

The Parents Television Council (PTC) released a new report today entitled Women in Peril: A Look at TV’s Disturbing New Storyline Trend. The report argues that “by depicting violence against women with increasing frequency, or as a trivial, even humorous matter, the broadcast networks may ultimately be contributing to a desensitized atmosphere in which people view aggression and violence directed at women as normative, even acceptable,” said PTC President Tim Winter.  As evidence the report cites… Nicole Kidman.  OK, it cites more than Nicole Kidman, but the 7-page report and accompanying press release does seem to place a lot of stock in the fact that, while being questioning by a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing about violence against women overseas, “Ms. Kidman conceded that Hollywood has probably contributed to violence against women by portraying them as weak sex objects, according to the Associated Press.”  I’m not sure what Ms. Kidman was doing testifying before Congress on the matter of violence against women overseas — dare I suggest some congressmen were out for another photo-op with a Hollywood celeb? — but the better question is whether Ms. Kidman’s opinion has any bearing on the question of what relationship, if any, there is between televised violence and real-world violence against women. (Incidentally, if she really feels passionately about all this, is she prepared to go back and recut some of her old scenes in “Dead Calm,” “To Die For,” and “Eyes Wide Shut“?)

But let’s not nitpick about the credentials Ms. Kidman brings to the table or whether it makes any sense for PTC to elevate her opinions to proof of theory when it comes to a supposed connection between depictions of violence against women in film or television and real world acts of violence against women. PTC, however, suggests that’s exactly what is going on today. They allude to a few lab studies which are of the “monkey see, monkey do” variety — where the results of artificial lab experiments are used to claim that watching depictions of violence will turn us all into killing machines, rapists, robbers, or just plain ol’ desensitized thugs.

There’s just one problem with such studies, and the PTC report:  Reality.  Whatever lab experiments might suggest, the evidence of a link between televised media violence and the real-world equivalent just does not show up in the data. The FBI produces ongoing Crime in the United States reports that document violent crimes trends. Here’s what the data tells us about overall violent crime, forcible rape, and juvenile violent crime rates over the past two decades: They have all fallen.  Perhaps most impressively, the juvenile crime rate has fallen an astonishing 36% since 1995.

Now, let me be perfectly clear about something.  When analyzing such things it is vitally important to recall one of the first rules of statistical analysis: correlation does not necessarily equal causation. This works in both directions. Even if an increase in real-world violence was closely tracking depictions of violence on television or in video games, it wouldn’t necessarily mean there is a connection. But it would also be wrong to state that, on its own, an inverse correlation (with the trends moving in opposite directions) meant that there was absolutely no connection between these things.

At the margin, I believe that some media can have negative impacts on some people. Certainly, in heavy enough doses, watching non-stop depictions of sex or violence probably would have some sort of negative effect on some people — loss of sleep, if nothing else. Perhaps more.

Then again, I just cannot entirely dismiss the real-world evidence being so starkly at odds with the “monkey see, monkey do” theories bandied about by PTC and some researchers or regulatory proponents. At a minimum, the real-world evidence should at least call into question the “world-is-going-to-hell” sort of generalizations made by proponents of increased media regulation, who all too often make casual inferences about the relationship between media exposure and various social indicators. Such a causal relationship is even more dubious today since all Americans, especially youngsters, are surrounded by a much wider variety of media than ever before. Even though television viewing has gone down slightly in recent years, it has been due to the rise of other media substitutes that command the attention of children, including the Internet, cell phones and video games. Overall, therefore, it appears that children are “consuming” as much, if not more, media than ever before. One would think that if depictions of violence in media really were leading to increased aggression among youth it would start showing up in some of these indicators at some point. But that’s just not occurring. [If you’re interested, I’ve discussed all these issues at much greater detail here, here, here, and here.]

Another argument I often here is: ‘Well, the numbers would be even better if not for media violence!’  But there’s just no way to prove that one way or the other. Would the juvenile crime rate be down 46% instead of the 36% decrease we’ve actually since 1995?  I don’t know. Nobody can know. But I certainly hope that media critics and regulatory proponents aren’t so foolish as to suggest that the crime rate would drop to zero if we just forced everybody to watch “Mary Poppins” all day long.

Finally, let’s assume that the PTC is right and that depictions of violence against women are on the rise on TV. I can actually accept that statement. With all the forensic science shows and crime dramas on TV today, it’s clear that some of the plot lines are going to involve people dying in some fashion and many of those people will be women. And yes, some of the depictions will get pretty gritty. “Fringe” and the various “CSI” shows are clearly showing things we didn’t see on “Quincy” back in the day. (Bring back Jack Klugman! He was awesome.)

But, hey, culture has changed.  Envelopes have been pushed a bit.  A little less is left to the imagination.  But most of us can live with that fact.  Indeed, many of us actually enjoy that fact!  And for those who do not share that worldview or who have heightened sensitivities about depictions of violence in TV shows, movies, or games, I would like to tell them that I really do understand and appreciate where they are coming from.

Yet, there are many other ways you can deal with that without forcing us all to forgo content we might enjoy consuming. And, you guessed it, this is where I remind the world for the umpteenth time that I have written a whole book about parental control tools and methods! [The shameless self-promotion never ends here, folks!]  In fact, part of the reason I have invested so much time in that project — and my ongoing efforts to get companies and other third parties to expand the range of tools, ratings, and other information that we have access to — is because I genuinely want to make sure that those individuals and families who have different needs and values than I have the ability to craft their own “household media standard.”   I want each family to be empowered to make media content decisions for themselves such that they can find the media content they want and discard all the rest. Luckily, that is the world we increasingly live in today. Parents have more tools and methods at their disposal to help them decide what constitutes acceptable media content in their homes and in the lives of their children.

I know that some critics including the PTC feel that the tools aren’t good enough, but I just don’t buy it. Sure, there’s always some room for improvement regarding parental control tools and rating systems, but the existing panoply of tools and methods offer families unprecedented control over their media consumption habits. And that includes tools and methods which enable them to find enriching and educational content, which we have more of than ever before.

I understand PTC doesn’t share my worldview on these matters.  But the difference between us is that they want to take something away from me (the right to watch certain types of content) while I want to give something to them (the ability to block that which they find distasteful).  To be fair, however, their report did not rush to the regulatory solution, even though they did call for more hearings and they warn that:

if the television industry is unwilling or unable to take serious steps to reduce or tone down such graphic images, then we will urge the Congress and the FCC, by virtue of their regulatory authority over the public airwaves, to step in and take action.

The problem is, I don’t think PTC will ever rest until all this content is removed from the airwaves altogether, even if millions of Americans actually enjoy that programming.  Again, the better solution is for PTC to work with others to improve the tools and methods available to families to more effectively make this decision for themselves.  I certainly don’t want others making these determinations for my wife and me and our two kids.  We’ve got the job handled, thank you very much.

The Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing yesterday where a number of Senators as well as Julius Genachowski, the new Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, did a lot of fretting about the state of the modern children’s television programming marketplace.  According to the Wall Street Journal, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV):

suggested that a “little red button” be required on TVs so that a child could push the button to find out how a show is rated. Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas agreed that a red button might help since parents often have difficulties figuring out which shows are appropriate for their children to watch.

Well, I have some good news for the Senators: There are already quite a few little buttons on every remote control made today, and at least one of those buttons can pull up an on-screen guide to get more program info! (Another of them can turn the TV off!) Moreover, the ratings for just about every program already appear at the beginning of each show, and sometimes in between. And you can find out plenty more online about every TV show under the sun if you care to look.  So, I’m not sure what that fuss is all about, and we certainly don’t need to mandate “little red buttons” on every TV set when program information can be found in so many other ways.

What is more troubling about all the hand-wringing taking place at the hearing, as well as the talk of reopening the Children’s Television Act of 1990 to potentially impose more content mandates on video programmers and distributors, is that: (1) there doesn’t seem to be much appreciation for just how much wonderful children’s programming is out there today compared to the past, and (2) there doesn’t seem to be much recognition of the serious First Amendment issues at stake when government gets involved in the messy business of regulating video programming.

On that first point, let me just reiterate what I have found after conducting an exhaustive survey of the market for children’s programming in my ongoing PFF special report, Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods.  I found that the overall market for family and children’s programming options continues to expand quite rapidly. Thirty years ago, families had a limited number of children’s television programming options at their disposal on broadcast TV.  Today, by contrast, there exists a broad and growing diversity of children’s television options from which families can choose. The list below highlights just some of the more popular family- or child-oriented networks available on cable, telco, and satellite television today. And this list continues to grow rapidly.

• ABC Family Channel (http://abcfamily.go.com)
• Animal Planet (http://animal.discovery.com)
• Anime Network (www.theanimenetwork.com)
• Black Family Channel (www.blackfamilychannel.com)
• Boomerang (www.cartoonnetwork.com/tv_shows/boomerang)
• Cartoon Network (www.cartoonnetwork.com)
• Discovery Channel (www.discovery.com)
• Discovery Kids (http://kids.discovery.com)
• Disney Channel (www.disney.go.com/disneychannel)
• Encore WAM!
• Familyland Television Network (www.familyland.org/content/Content.aspx?CategoryID=51)
• FUNimation (www.funimation.com)
• Hallmark Channel (www.hallmarkchannel.com)
• Hallmark Movie Channel (www.hallmarkmoviechannel.com)
• HBO Family (www.hbofamily.com)
• History Channel (www.history.com)
• KTV – Kids & Teens Television (www.ktvzone.com)
• Learning Channel (http://tlc.discovery.com)
• National Geographic Channel (http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel)
• Nickelodeon (www.nick.com)
• Nick 2
• Nick Toons (http://nicktoonsnetwork.nick.com/home.html)
• Noggin (www.noggin.com)
• N Channel (www.the-n.com)
• PBS (www.pbs.org)
• PBS Kids (http://pbskids.org/go)
• Science Channel (http://science.discovery.com)
• Showtime Family Zone
• Sprout (www.sproutonline.com)
• Starz! Kids and Family (http://www.starz.com/appmanager/seg/s?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=starz_kids_family)
• Toon Disney (http://psc.disney.go.com/abcnetworks/toondisney)
• Varsity World (www.varsityworld.com)

Importantly, this list does not include the growing universe of religious / spiritual television networks. Nor does it include the many family or educational programs that traditional TV broadcasters offer. Finally, the list does not include the massive market for interactive computer software or websites for children.  All of this begs the obvious question: What more is it that policymakers want?

More offerings are always welcome, of course.  But, on a personal note, as the parents of two young kids (ages 5 and 7), my wife and I regularly struggle to sort through all the wonderful video programming options at our disposal.  We often find ourselves swimming through an ocean of choices available from our local broadcasters and multichannel video provider. Moreover, our kids are spending an increasing amount of time watching snippets of video via kid-oriented online search portals like KidZui and Glubble. Such online walled gardens offer a safe place for parents to find terrific online content for their kids.

I have to admit, all the choices my kids have today have left me a bit jealous!  I grew up in small central Illinois town with a couple of crummy (Iowa-based!) broadcast stations that were barely visible on our TV (and usually only when my Dad made me hold the antenna and stick my arms up in the air to get reception!) There was also one local cinema in town that usually showed old movies from the ‘50s and ‘60s that few kids cared to see.  And that was generally the extent of video choices for kids in our town.  Sure, the 1970s brought us Sesame Street as well as Mister Rogers (if that was your cup of tea).  Today, however, we still have those shows and much, much more.  Our kids now enjoy an unprecedented cornucopia of media alternatives and, contrary to what some policymakers would have us believe, many of them are extremely high-quality in nature.  My parents would have likely given anything to just have even one network as incredibly enriching as Noggin at their disposal in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  Instead, on the occasions that the TV had to become a babysitter and nothing worthwhile was on the tube, I usually ended up watching trashy soap operas.  (Don’t even get me started on “Days of Our Lives.” I could write a short history of the show’s 1975-1982 seasons!)

Speaking of trashy shows, there was a lot of talk at yesterday’s hearing about the “need to protect our children from harmful content,” as Sen. Rockefeller began the hearing by arguing.  But as I have shown in my parental controls report, not only are there more and better quality options to steer your kids toward today, but it is easier than ever before to steer them right to those preferred options and lock down everything else in sight.  As I concluded in that report:

there has never been a time in our nation’s history when parents have had more tools and methods at their disposal to help them decide what constitutes acceptable media content in their homes and in the lives of their children. […] parents now have [many tools and techniques] at their disposal to better control media content and raise their children as they see fit. That is not to say that media and communications technologies don’t continue to play a major role in our society and culture. But… parents have been empowered with tools, controls, strategies, and information, that can help them devise and then enforce a media plan for their families that is in line with their own values.

So, again, it must be asked: What is the problem here?

Finally, it should be noted that any effort by Congress or the FCC to tinker with video programming marketplace will eventually run up against serious First Amendment concerns and eventual court challenges.  In a previous session of Congress, before he became Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Sen. Rockefeller aggressively pushed for expanded content controls, not just for broadcast television, but for cable and satellite platforms as well.  In a 2005 PFF report on Sen. Rockefeller’s “Indecent and Gratuitous and Excessively Violent Programming Control Act of 2005,” First Amendment attorney Robert Corn-Revere of the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine argued that efforts to expand the horizons of FCC regulation to cover more content and platforms “would be almost certain to fail a constitutional challenge.”  Likewise, in a 2007 PFF white paper, constitutional law expert Laurence H. Tribe of the Harvard Law School, noted that the old “it’s-for-the-children” rationale for such content regulation is exactly backwards:

the malleability of children—how easy it is to mold their minds and to influence them—counts against and not in favor of centralized governmental controls. One of the arguments that you will often find is, yes, it’s all very well to believe in free speech between consenting adults but we’re talking about kids here and their minds are like plastic and they are being molded and shaped and, therefore, we have greater power to protect them. Therefore, you should keep your hands off them because they are so easy to shape. No, no, no. The argument is not that kids are malleable and therefore, Big Brother should be empowered. The argument is that kids are malleable and, therefore, families should be empowered. Parental authority should be at the center of decision making.

Indeed. And, as already noted, parents have more tools and strategies to exercise that authority than ever before, as well as more programming options to choose from. Policymakers should be celebrating these modern media marketplace developments, not bemoaning them.  We are blessed to be living in the Golden Age of children’s video programming.

When the history books are finally written documenting America’s failed experiment with broadcast industry content regulation, this past week may go down as a critical moment in the story.  The obvious reason this week was so important was the Senate’s 87-11 vote on Thursday to prevent the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from reinstating the Fairness Doctrine.  But an equally important development this past week was the release of a new white paper by the radical Leftist activist group Free Press.

The Free Press, which was founded by the socialist media theorist Robert McChesney, doesn’t typically publish many things admitting to the failures of coercive government regulation. Nonetheless, in “The Fairness Doctrine Distraction,” a paper by Josh Silver and Marvin Ammori, the media reformistas at Free Press told their Big Government comrades in Congress and academia that it was finally OK to let go of at least this one old pet project of theirs.  In their paper, Silver and Ammori note that, “The Fairness Doctrine put the federal government in the position of judging content and controlling speech” and “Reinstating the Doctrine will not result in greater viewpoint diversity in broadcasting.”  They continue:

The Fairness Doctrine, while originally well-intentioned, is not wise public policy. [T]he Doctrine places the FCC in charge of determining what is fair in political speech — a difficult task in the best of circumstances. Placing the government in the role of monitoring and judging political speech will inevitably produce controversy that is impossible to resolve.

I applaud the Free Press for finally fessing up to the Fairness Doctrine’s many failings.  This First Amendment-violating abomination should have never been allowed to be enforced by the FCC to begin with, but at least we can now all finally agree it should stay off the books for good.

Of course, the radicals at the (Un)Free Press weren’t about to let one of the Left’s old favorite regulations go so away without asking for something in return.  One of the reasons that Silver and Ammori are suddenly willing to give their blessing to the Doctrine’s burial is because they want to get on with the more far-reaching agenda of micro-managing media markets using a variety of less visible regulations.

Indeed, in their paper, Silver and Ammori go to great pains to try to show that the Fairness Doctrine supposedly has nothing to do with all the other regulations that they want Congress and the FCC to continue to enforce, or even expand.  These goals include media ownership restrictions, diversity mandates, local programming regulation, and so on.  Recognizing that the Fairness Doctrine was not only ineffective but also a useful tool for many on the political Right to whip their base into action, the Free Press moved to preemptively divorce their other pet projects from the Fairness Doctrine.

It’s a brilliant tactical move by Free Press; lull Limbaugh and other conservatives into a deep sleep by throwing them the bone of a Fairness Doctrine win, and then push a far more radical regulatory agenda through the back-door once they’ve stopped paying attention.  Of course, these things cannot be as easily divorced as the Free Press radicals want us to believe.  The Fairness Doctrine was just one part of a much grander regulatory paradigm that so-called progressives have pushed for under the banner of “public interest regulation.”

There’s a rich mythology that has built up around “the public interest” efforts of the progressives, but like the Fairness Doctrine, it’s all just arbitrary government abuse of the First Amendment at the end of the day. Indeed, as I’ve noted here before, the public interest standard is not really a “standard” at all since it has no fixed meaning.  The definition of the phrase has shifted with the political winds to suit the whims of those in power at any given time.  As such, it represents an utter betrayal of the First Amendment and the rule of law.  And all the regulations that are pursued in the name of “serving the public interest” are really nothing more than crass political thuggery that have no relationship to what the public actually wants to see or hear.  The “public interest” should be what the public says it is, not a handful of unelected bureaucrats who want to spoon feed us nonsense we don’t want and then censor that stuff we actually desire.

The folks at the Free Press can tell us that there is no linkage between the Fairness Doctrine and all these other regulations, but that doesn’t make it so.  At the end of the day, these regulations share many things in common, especially their hopelessly arbitrary, First Amendment-betraying nature.

Thus, the war for true media freedom will continue.  Nonetheless, it is important not to lose sight of the important win this week for that cause with both Congress and the Free Press acknowledging the anti-free speech, diversity-destroying nature of the UnFairness Doctrine.