Consumer Choice vs. Pointless Publicity

As the reputation of cable television has darkened considerably over the last few years with every lurid Sopranos whacking and every ghoulish plastic surgery on Nip/Tuck, public protest and congressional inquiries have led the cable industry to promise change.

Change the tone of their TV slop? No, they promised a campaign to sell technological gadgetry to help the adults navigate around their gooey and graphic messes. Two years ago, the National Cable Television Association started a pathetic public-relations campaign suggesting cable was putting the parents in control by just educating them about the V-chip.

Its been a decade since Congress mandated the V-chip in TV sets, but the vast majority of parents have never used it, and many dont even know its there. The cable industry promised to fix that by spending $250 million multi-media education campaign. They also promised a few other reforms, such as increasing the size of the TV ratings information box displayed on screen at the start of cable shows, and inserting the box after each commercial break.

Recent public service ads with the Ad Campaign have cute little scenes of parents talking back to raunchy television characters, and telling them theyre going to be blocked for the sake of the children. The commercials direct parents to an educational website about the V-chip called TheTVBoss.org.

After all the promised ads and on-screen boxes, the facts are in. Its not working.

A brand new Zogby poll for the Parents Television Council shows that the vast majority of respondents (88 percent) said they do not have parental-control technology or have not used it in the last week. Thats pretty much unchanged from a similar poll last September, which also found almost nine in ten adults dont use the technology. Its not because they dont see a reason to use a V-chip. The new poll also shows that 79 percent of respondents agree there is too much sex, violence, and coarse language on television. Eighty percent agreed with that sentiment last September.

The public is still largely uneducated about the letters the networks use to describe potentially objectionable content. Only eight percent of people surveyed could correctly identify the content descriptors S for sexual situations, V for violence, L for language, and D for suggestive dialogue even when provided with the answer in a multiple-choice question. Last September, only seven percent could correctly identify the letters.

If the cable industry had this poor a record of helping sell McDonalds burgers or Toyotas to the public, theyd probably have to look for work.

But the cable industry didnt need for the ads to work. The whole campaign was a sleight of hand, a public-relations stunt to keep Washington from mandating more viewer choice in which channels the American people want to subsidize and welcome into their homes. They are providing the illusion of action, sponsoring pointless publicity that doesnt work, in the hope these hollow gestures will keep Washington politicians from derailing their corrosive race to the bottom.

The cable industrys TV Boss commercials never explained how to use the V-chip or cable-box parental controls. They just announced the fact that you have the technological gadget to do it. They never educated consumers about what the S, V, L, and D represent, or the difference between a Y-7 rating and a TV-14. They merely pointed out the website address and asked people to look them up to learn more.

Their commercials carry the slogan, Be the boss of what your kids watch. Parents can be the boss of their home, but theyre clearly not the bosses of television, despite the cute website address. Hollywood, and not the parents, is firmly in charge of the junk that dominates your set. Parents feel a responsibility to monitor what their children watch, but as the choices in cable TV proliferate, it gets harder and harder for parents to keep track. Parents dont feel they can possibly undo everything that the networks have done to shock, disgust, and titillate the viewers, even the youngest ones.

This ad campaign doesnt address the most glaring problem with the V-chip that even if every parent became a technological whiz with the blocking buttons, the broadcast and cable networks do an incredibly slipshod job of accurately describing potentially objectionable content with those letters than nobody knows.

Its time for Congress to get serious about the cable industrys social irresponsibility, because its clear the cable bosses arent serious. This is the last gasp for the credibility of cable companies. Their promises to help parents are cynically empty.