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REMOTE CONTROL
MAY 1, 1996
TRANSCRIPT
Another in our occasional series of reports on what's new in the telecommunications industry. Tom Bearden looks at the Canadian experience with the V-chip, a device that works to censor violent and unsuitable television programs from children.
TOM BEARDEN: Tim Collings is one of those people who unwittingly start a revolution by having the right idea at the right time. He's a Canadian electronics engineer who realized a few years ago that you could build a device that could selectively block programs from appearing on a television set. It may utterly change how children watch television. He built a prototype that could read a code embedded in the television signal which could be used to classify a program for sexual content, violence, and adult language. Parents could use it to take control of what their kids could see on TV.
TIM COLLINGS, V-Chip Inventor: I think it would, it would be very soothing for me to know that, that they're watching the types of programming that I approve of without me actually having to go down and watch it with them.
TOM BEARDEN: While Americans have been debating whether or not there is a connection between television violence and behavior, Canadians had decided there is and are actually doing something about it. Canada's anti-violence crusade began in 1989, when a gunman killed 14 young women in a Montreal classroom. Many people laid the blame for the appalling crime on violence in the media. In 1992, Virginie Larivierre's younger sister was raped and murdered. Thirteen year old Virginie blamed the crime on television and mounted a national petition drive that eventually gathered a million and a half signature demanding a law to ban violent programs, this in a country of just 27 million people. Politicians, including Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, took notice. Keith Spicer is the head of the Canadian Radio and Television Commission which regulates broadcasting.
KEITH SPICER, Chair, Radio and Television Commission: As regulators, we said, look, all we want to do is act as a catalyst here for discussion, a broker of ideas, and we said to them, let's sit down and look at this together, let's go and have dinner, for example. We didn't have to huff and puff and say, we'll blow your house down. We were saying, look, if you don't like the carrots we're feeding you guys, how do you like Virginie's stick?
TOM BEARDEN: Subsequent meetings led to a complete but voluntary ban on violent children's shows. Professor Collings faxed Spicer a diagram of his V-chip. It seemed the answer to everyone's prayers, capable of shutting off all programs parents found objectionable for children but still allowing adults to view them, thereby neatly addressing the censorship issue. The chip is now being tested in actual households. It allows each program, except for sports and news, to be rated in four categories: violence, sex, language, and an overall rating similar to the current movie rating system. It runs from G to R for restricted. The other categories have six levels of intensity. In the violence category, for example, Level One is comic violence like cartoons. Level Five means graphic violence, decapitation, impalement. The ratings are inserted in the black bar between pictures next to the closed captions. Each test family has been given a small remote control like this one being handled by Alison Clayton. She's a consultant who organized the tests.
ALISON CLAYTON, V-Chip Consultant: The bar is how the broadcaster has encoded the program. You can see that there is a Level Three for violence. The arrow is the level that the family has set for their threshold. The picture is going to come on because the arrow is higher than the broadcaster has encoded it in any one of the four categories. We have set our level lower than the PG. We've set it at G. The broadcaster has rated this as a PG, so this program is not going to come through because the broadcaster has rated the program higher in one of the four categories than we have set.
TOM BEARDEN: But the key to all this is regardless of what the rating is, if it exceeds any category, the set will not transmit the picture?
ALISON CLAYTON: That's right. That's right. In any one of the four categories.
TOM BEARDEN: The V-chip is fairly straightforward. The rating process is not. The key to the success or failure of the V-chip rests on whether the public agrees with how a broadcaster rates a program, and that is a very subjective task. Linda Leslie rates shows for the government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. She says even a six level rating system doesn't address all the subtleties of evaluating a program like the current NBC situation comedy "The Nanny," which often deals obliquely with adult material.
TOM BEARDEN: How is "The Nanny" different from children's programs, for example?
LINDA LESLIE, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: Well, really it isn't but it does have adult themes to it. But I guess the reason that it does get rated the same way is because a lot of "The Nanny's" humor is innuendo, and it probably would not be understood by young children. But to rate it the same way as Sesame Street somehow doesn't seem right.
TOM BEARDEN: It's even harder for these programmers. They work for CFMT, a multicultural station in Toronto that airs a lot of foreign programs. Many of them don't fit into neat categories.
MAN: See, but this kind of action beating could easy--like a four, rather than a three.
TOM BEARDEN: The really tricky ratings problems are worked out in weekly meetings. This Chinese language action film had a lot of roughhouse violence. Madeline Ziniak, the executive producer, and Coleman Zito, a senior producer for Chinese programming, led the discussion.
MADELINE ZINIAK: What we're going to put as the first number is the audience category, so we can agree that this is, audience category is restricted, which would be four. Yeah. And then we will get into the violence is, what, four?
TOM BEARDEN: This is the unavoidably subjective part of the V-chip system. For the chip to do its job in a family's living room, someone has to sit around the conference table to decide where each program fits into that imperfectly defined zero to five scale. For example, this scene: Is the action mild, brief, violent, or graphic? Watch how the judgment evolves as they view more of the scene.
WOMAN: It's not bloody.
MADELINE ZINIAK: No, it's not, you know, it's not, it's not explicit, nor is it graphic. But then again it's not brief. You know, we're really looking at a category where there's extended violence. Oh, there, perfect, yes, it's restricted, yeah. Is that a body underneath the car?
TOM BEARDEN: Once they agree on violence, it's time to measure sexual content.
COLEMAN ZITO: It could be a zero or one, I think.
MADELINE ZINIAK: Zero or one?
COLEMAN ZITO: Yeah, zero or one.
MADELINE ZINIAK: Because really unless you get into the whole, umm, story line where they're using the woman as ransom and, you know, that whole area, I don't know. I would--I would--
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: --put it as one.
MADELINE ZINIAK: Yeah. I would say it's one, one, because rather than looking at the sexuality part at face value, you know, you're looking at, you know, the ransom part of it, and all of that, so, okay.
BARNEY: (singing) We can waddle like a duck, hop like a froggy--
TOM BEARDEN: Maxine Lawson and her son are part of the current round of testing. She tries to be strict about what two year old Kaedin watches on TV. She had some trouble programming this early version of the V-chip, but she's grateful that it will automatically cut off anything she thinks is inappropriate.
MAXINE LAWSON: I don't want him to watch wrestling, "Mortal Kombat," umm, there's some of the dramas that they have on TV where they deck people and so on. When he sees that, he doesn't want me to change the channel. I caught him last week changing the channel, and it gets to "Mike Hammer," and I saw him and he's just looking and, you know, then he started punching the way Mike was punching someone on the TV, and so I changed the channel and he goes, "No, put back, put it back." And the way he looked at me and he came over and he started hitting me the same way that they were hitting.
TOM BEARDEN: The system now being tested in Canada isn't completely set in stone. Canadian officials have been meeting with American lawmakers like Rep. Ed Markey and Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association in hopes of establishing a single North American rating system. What eventually emerges may look somewhat different than the test chip. A single North American standard is vitally important to Canadian broadcasters because most of the programs they telecast are made in the U.S. It's important to U.S. program producers too because Canada is one of their biggest foreign markets. Time is critical for Canadian programmers. The government has mandated V-chips be available to all Canadian cable viewers this fall, and that's most of the Canadian audience, because cable is more prevalent North of the border. The clock is ticking South of the border too. The new U.S. Telecommunications Act requires V-chips be installed in all new television sets within two years.
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