Parents, not networks, should decide what kinds of programming their children watch, which is why ratings exist. But a rating system that withholds material facts about its content is no longer a reliable filter — it is a blindfold.Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 based on this very premise. The law pressed the television industry to build a ratings system that families could use to judge what content is allowed into their homes using the TV Parental Guidelines, the codes in the corner of the screen. TV-Y and TV-Y7 sort children’s programming by age, and content descriptors flag the reasons behind a rating: V for violence, L for coarse language, S for sexual situations, and D for suggestive dialogue. The list has expanded since the 1990s. If you turn on a kids movie from the 1940s, you will now often find a warning label for “smoking.”Those labels are not assigned by the government. They are assigned by the TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board, a body composed largely of the same networks and studios that produce the shows. The arrangement asks the industry to grade its own homework and to report honestly to parents about what each episode contains.
ABC OBJECTS TO ‘UNLAWFUL’ EARLY LICENSE RENEWAL FOR TELEVISION STATIONS
