For all the noise that has been coming from Congress and various conservative and religious groups about indecency on television over the past year, there has finally begun to be a little pushback from the other side.
A new group called the TV Watch Coalition, which launched on Wednesday, is coming out in opposition to expanding the federal government’s control over television programming, while championing the adoption of parental controls — like program content ratings and blocking technologies — to monitor children’s television viewing habits.
The group is made up of a bipartisan coalition of organizations and individuals, including the American Conservative Union, Americans for Tax Reform, Center for Creative Voices in Media, US Chamber of Commerce, the Creative Coalition, Media Freedom Project and the Media Institute. However, its funding comes from the big boys of corporate media: NBC Universal, News Corporation and Viacom. This, of course, opens the group to charges that it is biased in favor of conglomerate media interests who don’t want the FCC and Congress tinkering with their content and programming decisions. (Or, as Brent Bozell, head of the Parents Television Council, wrote on the PTC’s Web site, TV Watch is “a collection of random citizen and public policy groups that have simply been hired and paid for by the networks to do their dirty work.”)
Regardless of the funding question, a TV Watch public opinion poll released yesterday jibes with some other recent polls showing that Americans are uneasy about actions Congress is taking to increase indecency fines — and to include pay cable operators such as HBO under the FCC’s fining blanket.
The poll, conducted in March, found that 92 percent of respondents “agree that while they don’t always like the content of the programs that they and their families watch,” they would “rather make [the decision what to watch] than have the government make the decision for me.” This squares with a Pew Research Center poll released in April that found that 86 percent of respondents feel that parents — rather than government or the entertainment industry — bear responsibility for keeping their children away from indecent content. Pew also found that 62 percent of parents feel that they are currently provided with enough information to help them decide what media is appropriate for their children.
Despite those resounding votes in favor of personal choice over government regulation, pro-regulatory groups like Bozell’s and the American Family Association have long owned the debate — and shoddy reporting about the indecency issue hasn’t helped matters much.
Jim Dyke, executive director of TV Watch told CJR Daily that “It’s important to understand that the debate is being conducted by one side. There’s been no vehicle for the other side, and what we plan to do is educate people about the decisions they can make.”
The fact is that the technology already exists to allow parents to monitor and block content they don’t want their children to watch. The problem is that most people simply don’t know about it. Dyke says that the objective of TV Watch is to provide people with the information they need to use technology to make decisions for themselves.
Come to think of it, that’s what a democracy is supposed to be all about — free markets, free people.
–Paul McLeary
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.