MAKING TELEVISION SAFE FOR KIDS

By NEWTON N.MINOW AND CRAIG L. LAMAY NEWTON N. MINOW, FORMER CHAIRMAN OF THE FCC, IS AN ATTORNEY AND CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF THE CARNEGIE CORP. ADAPTED FROM ABANDONED IN THE WASTELAND: CHILDREN, TELEVISION AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT, BY MINOW AND CRAIG L. LAMA

In 1961, shortly after President John F. Kennedy appointed me chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, I told the nation's broadcasters, the people who in those days ran the television business, that they had made television into a "vast wasteland."

Almost overnight those two words became television's first enduring sound bite. For decades, they have been used, over and over and over again, to describe what Americans find when they come home after work in the evenings and turn on their television sets, what our children find there after school or on Saturday morning. "Vast wasteland" appears in newspaper headlines, in book titles, in magazine articles, in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, even as the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question.

The two words I wanted people to remember from that speech, however, were not "vast wasteland." The two words I cared about were "public interest."

The law governing radio and television broadcasting, the Federal Communications Act of 1934, gives broadcasters free and exclusive use of broadcast channels on condition that they serve the "public interest, convenience and necessity." Because the act did not define what the public interest meant, Congress, the courts and the fcc have spent 60 frustrating years struggling to figure it out. To me the answer is clear. The public interest meant and still means what we should constantly ask: What can television do for our country, for the common good, for the American people? Most important, I believe, the public interest requires us to ask what we can do for our children. By the time most Americans are 18 years old, they have spent more time in front of a television set than they have spent in school, and far more than they have spent talking with their teachers, their friends or even their parents. Why haven't we acted to give our children a healthier television environment?

For half a century, anyone who has questioned the American commercial-television system has been shouted down as a censor. Instead of talking seriously about how to improve television for our children, Americans argue to a stalemate about broadcasters' rights and government censorship. We neglect discussion of moral responsibility by converting the public interest into an economic abstraction, and we use the First Amendment to stop debate rather than to enhance it, thus reducing our first freedom to the logical equivalent of a suicide pact.

Apart from public television, our television system is a business attuned exclusively to the marketplace. Children are treated as a market to be sold to advertisers at so many dollars per thousand eyeballs. In such a system, children are not seen as the future of democracy, nor does the television industry consider that it has a special responsibility for their education, values and nurturing. The Children's Television Act of 1990 marked the first time Congress recognized children as a special audience, and it requires commercial broadcasters to provide "educational and informational" programs for them.

Until recently, however, broadcasters ignored the law. After researchers discovered that stations throughout the country were claiming cartoons and old episodes of Leave It to Beaver and The Jetsons met the law's requirements, the fcc began a proceeding to make them clean up their act. There are more good children's television shows today than there have been in more than a decade, but even now 60% of the programs broadcasters claim meet the minimal requirements of the Children's Television Act air between 5:30 a.m. and 7 a.m.

If we want to change the system, we should not be deterred by false choices. The choice is not between free speech and the marketplace on the one hand, and governmental censorship and bureaucracy on the other. The choice is to serve the needs of children and use the opportunities presented by the superhighway in the digital age to enrich their lives. If we turn away from that choice, the consequences of our inaction will be even greater educational neglect, more craven and deceptive consumerism and inappropriate levels of sex and violence-a wasteland vaster than anyone can imagine, or would care to. Let us do for our children today what we should have done long ago.

At minimum, public policy should focus on three goals:

-- It should meet the child's need to be prepared for life as a productive citizen. Television, the nation's most powerful teacher, should be a conduit for the generational transmission of democratic values and the values of simple decency.

-- It should meet the child's need to be protected from harm that comes from continuous exposure to violence whose primary purpose is to serve as a conveyance for commercial matter.

-- It must give every advantage to parents, helping them not only to control the passage of strangers in and out of their home but also to be better parents; it should place a premium on parent education and support, including parent-to-parent support.

Now is the time for americans to rebuild our television system. Translating the public interest into a commitment to our children will take time and public debate. We challenge the American people to demand that debate and participate in it, for in the long run it will take a combination of broad education, wise parenting, corporate responsibility, and smart and forceful lawmaking to improve children's telecommunications.

We propose, first of all, that Congress give broadcasters two alternatives: either make an enforceable commitment to meet a specified standard of programming service for children on each of however many channels they operate, or forgo public service to children and pay for their use of the spectrum.

This recommendation will work only if two conditions are met. The first is that Congress grant broadcasters an antitrust exemption so that they may cooperate in the production and scheduling of quality children's programming. Requiring broadcasters to meet such a minimal public service is reasonable, but asking them to take financial lumps in the name of public service is counterproductive-and, more important, competition in this area will not benefit children. Far better that a network such as Fox, which has already had success with its preschool series Cubhouse, continue to program for younger viewers, while cbs serves six-to-10-year-olds and nbc, perhaps, young teens. Broadcasters might also differentiate their programs by subject matter. cbs, for example, airs the wonderfully wacky science show Beakman's World for older children and young teens; abc might offer a science show for younger viewers, or perhaps a reading or news program. If broadcasters could discuss scheduling and avoid concurrent airtimes, children would be able to watch all the quality programs made just for them, providing children with a brighter palette of weekly programming and giving broadcasters a realistic opportunity to build a loyal viewership for their programs.

No such initiative will work without a critical second step: that the required programming be clearly labeled as the broadcaster's compliance with the law. The label should work just as the signs do that millions of Americans post prominently in the windows of their homes and businesses, letting children know these places are safe refuges. The programming label would indicate that the program's primary purpose is to educate, not to sell toys or junk food, and that it is safe; that there is a friend in the house instead of a stranger.

If broadcasters choose the second alternative, they will effectively be relieved of their public-interest obligations, but in return they will have to pay a percentage of their annual revenues-between 1% and 3%-for spectrum leases. The money from those leases should, in turn, be required by statute to go to the production of children's programming on public broadcasting.

The money generated by a spectrum fee on broadcasters could go a long way. Today annual gross television-broadcasting revenues in the U.S. are conservatively estimated at about $25 billion; by itself, a bare minimum of 1% of broadcast-television revenues would pay annually for $250 million of children's programming; 3% would provide $750 million, a sum with which Americans could transform not only children's television but childhood itself.

Though the information superhighway may eventually dispense with many of the public-interest obligations that marked the age of broadcasting, our responsibility to protect and educate our children will never be among them. Even skeptics who believe the public interest is beyond definition know it lies in the hearts and minds of children. If as a nation we cannot figure out what the public interest means with respect to those who are too young to vote, who are barely literate, who are financially, emotionally and even physically dependent on adults, then we will never figure out what it means anywhere else. Our children are the public interest, living and breathing, flesh and blood.

Or will we, once again, abandon our children to the wasteland?