Led by the Parents Television Council, the 28-member group asks the commission to review “the woefully-ineffective TV Content Ratings System, which is failing to protect children from harmful and explicit TV content on both broadcast and cable television.” It also launched a petition calling for reform.
Groups To FCC: Overhaul TV Content Ratings
In a letter addressed to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and each FCC Commissioner, the Parents Television Council and 27 other organizations and individuals concerned about the media’s impact on children urged the commission “to take immediate steps to evaluate whether the existing age-based television content ratings system is serving the needs of parents and families.” The full letter can be found here.
The PTC also launched a petition so that members of the public can call for change of the TV content ratings system.
“This broad coalition of organizations and individuals is urging the FCC to review the woefully-ineffective TV Content Ratings System, which is failing to protect children from harmful and explicit TV content on both broadcast and cable television,” said PTC President Tim Winter. “Signatories to this letter span the political spectrum, thereby demonstrating the severity of an issue in urgent need of attention by our public servants in Washington.
“The TV Content Ratings System is an FCC-sanctioned regime that was ostensibly created to help parents protect their children from explicit television programming. Instead, parents are being deceived by a system that serves as a Trojan Horse for delivering age-inappropriate content into living rooms around the country on a daily basis,” Winter continued. “Not only do the TV networks face a financial conflict of interest in rating programs accurately, but the integrity of the system is handed to an ‘oversight body’ that is controlled by the very same TV network executives who rate the programs wrong to begin with.”
Winter said the coalition’s first step is urging the FCC to overhaul the Oversight Monitoring Board, and “to review and revise the statues under which the TVOMB is organized to better ensure consistency, transparency, accuracy and accountability; and to guarantee that the ratings are serving the families for whom they were intended, not merely providing cover for the entertainment industry. We are also asking concerned Americans to sign our petition so their voices calling for reform can be heard,” Winter added.
The 28 coalition members are: The Parents Television Council; American Family Association; American Family Association of Pennsylvania; American Decency Association; Awake America Ministries; BarbWire.com; The Brushfires Foundation; Brad J. Bushman, Ph.D.; The Ohio State University; Citizens for Community Values; Citizens for Community Values of Indiana; Delman Coates, Ph.D., Mt. Ennon Baptist Church; Concerned Women for America; Enough is Enough; Family Research Council; Hawaii Christian Coalition; Industry Ears; Institute for Healthy Families; Institute for Youth Development; Jewish Institute for Global Awareness; Media Research Center; Meridian Magazine; Mission America; Morality in Media; Nell Minow, Movie Mom; National Center on Sexual Exploitation; One Million Moms; Rap Rehab; Southern Evangelical Seminary.
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Comments (6)
Maria Black says:
May 9, 2016 at 1:46 pm
These people can’t shut up fast enough. How about you teach children about violence instead of pretending it doesn’t exist? Let them understand the good and the bad about our society.
Cameron Miller says:
May 9, 2016 at 7:15 pm
It’s not that, they’re concerned that shows rated TV-14 feature content that would warrant a TV-MA rating. And same on those who try to silence those who express such opposition to the current TV rating system.
Ida Anderson says:
May 9, 2016 at 4:45 pm
This pressure group has won a battle here and there over the years, but they’ve lost the war. The V chip is something they wanted and got, but no one uses it and broadcast TV is more, ummm, adult than ever. They are never satisfied, but if you ignore them (as some producers, networks and even advertisers have), they go elsewhere.
Kristina Veltri says:
May 9, 2016 at 8:11 pm
The TV ratings have been hilariously ineffective because the networks are still in control and quite a few of them just “blanket-rate” to get it out of the way, especially Scripps Interactive where a show on Food Network or HGTV can have multiple bleeped F-bombs and can still comfortably get a TV-G. At the very least a neutral third party has to be in control of ratings, but few use the ratings system because all of the PSAs about actually learning how to use it have been pushed off the air by more direct ads and the website for the system is woefully out of date.
Keith ONeal says:
May 9, 2016 at 10:12 pm
The PTC and PETA are two useless groups that need to go away. Far far away. Send them to Pluto.