Attacking Violence on Television

The cover story for this week's Broadcasting & Cable is about the FCC's coming crackdown on violence in broadcast and possibly cable (Congress and FCC Take Aim):

Under orders from leaders of the House Commerce Committee, FCC Chairman Michael Powell by the end of the year will start investigating whether the commission should restrict onscreen violence. Cable can't count on immunity either. Growing ranks of lawmakers say cable must do more to make sure that children aren't exposed to potentially traumatizing content.

It should be noted that these lawmakers are quite bi-partisan, including leading members of both parties. Of course, the FCC has an important role to play as well.

At the FCC, the TV-violence inquiry will focus on whether the government can limit violent programs without violating free-speech rights. If those constitutional issues can be resolved, then the FCC must decide how tough the limits should be.

Unfortunately, there is no clear law in this area. One can plausibly argue that it is as permissible to regulate violent broadcasts to protect children as it is to regulate indecent broadcasts. From an institutional perspective, particularly under the current censorship-happy regime, I can't imagine a report that says, "Nope, we can't regulate violent programming." Heck, I rather expect that the FCC will discover that it already has the power to regulate violent programming under their new definition of what constitutes profane expression (FCC Revives Notion of the Profane).

It may be that the one of the only major problems with regulating violence is the unclear impact it has on children. Not to worry, though, Sen. Lieberman will fix that:

Because so much of the data is inconclusive and sometimes contradictory, Lieberman calls it a "patchwork" of data. "We can do better than that," he says.

Glad he already knows how the scientific studies will turn out.