Page 104 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Ch ldren and Effects: From Sesame Street to Columb ne |

what their children might be secretly listening to and whether that private music
might have negative consequences.
Though anxieties about the effects of music, television, and film on children
still bubble up, video games and the Internet are today seen as the biggest threats
to children. Video games are assumed to make children violent and sexually
precocious; the Internet is often assumed to be swarming with sexual preda-
tors. To keep children “safe” from the Internet, conservative politicians and
activists fought for the inclusion of the Communications Decency Act (CDA)
in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The CDA was intended to make the
entire Internet devoid of content that might harm minors. This proved both
unfeasible—given the Internet’s vast, decentralized, international sprawl—and
unconstitutional. The courts struck down the CDA as a First Amendment viola-
tion almost immediately.

govErnmEnT rEguLaTion oF TELEvision
In the 1950s, Senator Estes Kefauver led hearings on juvenile delinquency,
which included testimony on the possible effects of TV, radio, and comics on chil-
dren, and Senator Thomas Dodd held hearings specifically on television violence
in the early 1960s. Senator John Pastore held hearings on TV violence in 1972
in response to a series of studies on “Television and Social Behavior” that had
been commissioned by the Surgeon General’s Office. The studies’ results were in-
conclusive: it was clear that viewing violent images might have short-term effects
on children’s behavior, but whether the images could cause damage over time re-
mained very much an open question. In any case, the government did not attempt
to directly regulate television content as a result of the studies.
ACT fought a long battle for the regulation of children’s television, and in
the 1970s the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) instituted a number
of rules for children’s television, regulating the ratio of program to commercial
content, adding separators (“bumpers”) between programs and ads, and elimi-
nating “host-selling,” the practice of television hosts (lead actors on children’s
shows) directly hawking goods to their young viewers during programs. These
regulations were clearly designed with the assumption that excessive commer-
cialism had negative effects on child viewers. The regulations were undone in
the 1980s by President Ronald Reagan’s FCC.
In the 1990s, politicians debated the V-chip, a device to be implanted in all
televisions that would enable parents to block out inappropriate content. The
V-chip requirement was included in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. “V”
stood for “violence,” as promoters of the chip assumed that violent material was
the content that parents were most concerned about. Conservative religious
activists opposed the chip, advocating instead (without success) that TV should
simply be cleaned up across the board so that V-chips were unnecessary.
As a result of persistent activist pressure, the Children’s Television Act (gen-
erally supported by Democratic politicians and opposed by Republican politi-
cians) was finally passed in 1990. The Act requires broadcasters—but not cable
providers—to provide three hours of educational or informational programming