The Demystification of the Black Box

President Clinton recently announced his contribution to ending violent impulses in America. Jumping into the family values fray, he voiced his support for "parental responsibility" in regulating television viewing, made possible by a new techological innovation. A device called a "V chip" may now be built in to the back of the television, allowing parents to monitor programming that comes into their homes. Each program would be tagged with a violence rating; parents would simply adjust the V chip to the level of violence they would allow.

While we tend to associate the promotion of "family values" in the political arena with conservative Republican sound bytes such as the infamous Dan Quayle/Murphy Brown debacle, Clinton's support of the V chip does not mark the first time that Democrats have urged families to monitor their children's exposure to the more-provocative aspects of the entertainment industry.

It is clearly reminiscent, for instance, of Tipper Gore's campaign for warning labels on compact discs. Rather than admitting to censorship, they insist that increasing awareness of potential corrupters of children is the goal. The device is meant as a way to monitor viewing as more households are made up of working parents and television programming becomes more and more extensive.

The Republican Senate, ironically putting aside usual objections to government involvement in favor of promoting the family, included support for the V chip in a recent telecommunications bill. While few would argue with the need for parents to protect their young children from the harms of the world, the publicity surrounding Clinton's endorsement of the Senate promotion of the V chip reveals a number of underlying problems.

One of the weakest arguments for the V chip in general is that it allows network television to offer more adult programming, since adults will be able to weed out what they do not want their children to view. Parents seem to want the best of all worlds. Rather than some cable television packages in which parents may chose note to subscribe to entire channels, or limit these channels to certain times of the day, they can avoid having to block out an entire network affiliate. Selective restriction seems to be a good compromise.

However, there are strong practical objections to the V chip. At worst, it elicits cries of censorship. At best, the task of both defining what constitutes violence and getting broadcasters to agree to a potentially self-defeating high violence rating seems both enormous and unrealistic. Further, assigning an objectionable level of violence rather than allowing parents to guide what their children watch on a program-by-program basis may prove that viewing will become more arbitrary instead of less so.

Realistically, by the time kids can operate the television, they will notice that their viewing privileges are being monitored. They'll see advertisements for an action movie throughout the day, and will be suspicious when they sit down to watch it that night and see a blank screen. At the same time, these daytime teaser ads will undoubtedly become more common, as networks find that they are losing a good portion of their viewing audience to the little black box behind the television.

As Mrs. Gore's campaign for labeling albums shows, many of these so-called acts of "parental responsibility" simply create yet another forbidden fruit for children. The "cool" kids, the ones who buy the restricted CDs and sneak into R movies, will inevitably find their V chip and dismantle it, or change its level. The homes of the "cool" parents who do not use a V chip, or who set theirs to a lower level, will be sought as hangouts.

Once the kids find their way to the forbidden programs, they will inevitably watch the violent shows with even greater interest, wanting to see the "bad" parts. Surely, the chip will evolve into a bargaining point, as well as a point of contention in households, so that cries of "if I take out the trash and clean my room and walk the dog can I watch a level three show tonight?" will become common.

Beyond increasing the appeal of violence, more and more practical problems which are sure to arise, such as when three siblings, ages five, 10 and 15, share a television and parents are forced to choose between the increasingly "adult" unfiltered and too-filtered programming. Moreover, the advent of the chip represents yet another substitute for parental involvement. The television has become an electronic babysitter for many children. A sign of "parental responsibility" is not setting a level of violence, but providing a home in which alternatives to the world of television exist.

If parents truly object to the violence they see on the screen, they should lobby for this violence to be removed from the networks entirely, so all viewers may expect certain standards of decency, whatever they may be determined to be. Or, recognizing that television is a business like any other, they should fail to patronize the advertisers who support "objectionable" shows.

Selective restriction of access to programming runs counter to one of the greatest goals of television, the dissemination of information. What will be next? A V Chip for advertising--filtering out infomercials, denture creams or the "Nacho Man?" A V Chip for different topics with settings for "no Amy Fisher," or "no O.J." or even "no Clinton?"

Beyond just the potential problems with random censorship, though, this device, costly to make and promote, is a small drop in the bucket towards combating violence. Rather than worrying about what is coming into the house on the television screen, parents should worry about what the children will face when they emerge from the house.

There is no V chip to filter out the violence which children will witness brewing in their neighborhoods and schools. Undoubtedly, a family who sits down to watch their local news with the V chip set at its most restrictive level will find most of the footage cut off.

If the goal of the program is to protect our children from violence, we must realize that violence on television reflects the violence in our country--it does not create it. Preventing real, not fantasy, violence should be the priority of the parents and the President. In the home and in the government, clamoring for the V chip is a sign that we are looking for yet another way to find a convenient and politically popular Band-Aid without putting in the real effort to heal the gaping wound.