Conglomerates and codes

Network ownership changed again in the 1990s. The Walt Disney Company announced its plans to acquire Capital Cities/ABC in 1995 just one day before CBS accepted an offer to be purchased by the Westinghouse Corporation. Both deals created enormous media conglomerates that included production facilities, broadcast stations, cable channels, and an assortment of other major media venues. In 2000 CBS and Viacom joined together, creating a company that owned, among other things, two broadcast networks, CBS and UPN.

In the arena of regulation, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed as the most comprehensive communications policy since 1934. Described as “deregulatory and re-regulatory,” it continued to encourage free-market competition by eliminating or weakening the industry restraints that were still intact, but it also instituted new rules covering children’s programming and programming with violent and sexually explicit material. The deregulatory aspects of the act included yet another extension of the term of a broadcast license, this time to eight years. Single owners, who had been restricted to 7 TV stations until 1980, 12 in 1985, and 20 in 1994, were now allowed to own an unlimited number of stations as long as the total coverage of those stations did not exceed 35 percent of the total U.S. population. The “duopoly rule,” which forbade any company to own more than one station of its kind (TV, AM radio, FM radio) per market until 1992, was eliminated and replaced by a formula based on the population of the market. The act also allowed networks to own cable companies, and telephone companies could own cable systems in their local service regions, neither of which had been permitted before 1996. The Prime Time Access Rule, which had limited networks to three hours of programming between 7:00 pm and 11:00 pm Eastern Standard Time, was also dropped.

Increased sensitivity toward program content, however, resulted in some new regulations. One of these required that stations air at least three hours of children’s educational programming per week. A heightened emphasis on “family values” and a widely held belief that social violence was to some degree being generated by violent content on TV were addressed by the new policy with the introduction of a program ratings code and a requirement that all new television sets be equipped with a violent-program-blocking device known as a V-chip. Ratings codes were required to appear on the screen for 15 seconds at the beginning of each show: TV-Y designated appropriateness for all children; TV-Y7 meant that the show was designed for children age 7 and older; TV-G indicated appropriateness for all audiences; TV-PG suggested parental guidance—that the program contained material that could be considered unsuitable for younger children; TV-14 suggested that many parents might find the program inappropriate for anyone under age 14; and TV-MA warned that the program was designed for adults over age 17. Beyond the first two categories, the ratings measured violence, sexual content, and coarse language. The ratings system is flawed at best: the age designations—especially those at 14 and 17—seemed to many arbitrary and insensitive to the variation in development between teenagers. Moreover, the application of the system depended entirely upon the sensibilities of those doing the rating, as did the singling out of language, sex, and violence as the categories for judgment. Some complained that only entertainment programs were rated, when in fact many news shows were becoming increasingly violent and sexually explicit. Some producers, of course, claimed that the ratings system was a form of censorship.

A key factor in the operation of the ratings system was the V-chip, which enabled parents to block out individual programs or entire ratings categories, making them accessible only by a secret code. At the turn of the 21st century, the effectiveness of the V-chip remained in question. Many older children have in fact used the adult ratings as an indicator of programs they may be more interested in watching, and many children are more likely to have the technical skills to engage and disengage the V-chip than their parents. It might also be noted that the ratings system actually increased the number of programs with explicit sexual content, violence, or strong language. In the movie industry, content was originally voluntarily regulated by the Hays Production Code (see Will H. Hays), which limited the kind of language and subject matter (especially that of a sexual or violent nature) allowed in a film. The Hays code was superseded by a ratings system in 1966, from which time “adult” content in movies has been more and more common. One might expect that the television ratings system could also produce the opposite of the desired effect. Once a rating is available for adult programming, there is a sense in which that programming has institutionalized permission to exist. As long as a program carries a TV-MA rating, one might argue, then it is free to present content that may have been discouraged before a ratings system was in place. Indeed, many language and sexual barriers have been broken on both cable and broadcast TV since the introduction of the ratings system in 1996.