CHIPS AHOY

By Richard Zoglin

ON NBC'S LAW & ORDER LAST WEEK, a white racist set off a bomb that killed 20 people on a New York City subway train. Tori Spelling, in the CBS movie Co-Ed Call Girl, grabbed a gun and shot a sleazy pimp. Batman (the cartoon character) was almost thrown into a vat of flames by the Penguin. Lemuel Gulliver (the Ted Danson character) battled gigantic bees in the land of Brobdingnag. And Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy slapped around bad guys in the umpteenth cable showing of 48 HRS.

It was, in other words, a pretty typical week of TV in mid-'90s America. Another week, in the view of troubled parents and concerned politicians, in which TV continued to assault youngsters with violent images, encouraging aggressive behavior in a culture where handguns and street violence are rampant. But it was also a landmark week that brought new hope to many parents worried that scenes like the above are doing untold damage to their kids.

As President Clinton signed into law the sweeping telecommunications bill passed by Congress, he officially launched the era of the V chip. A little device that will be required equipment in most new TV sets within two years, the V chip allows parents to automatically block out programs that have been labeled (by whom remains to be seen) as high in violence, sex or other objectionable material. Last week also saw the release of a weighty academic study that said, in effect, it's about time. Financed by the cable industry and conducted by four universities, the study concluded that violence on TV is more prevalent and more pernicious than most people had imagined. Of nearly 2,700 shows analyzed in a 20-week survey of 23 channels, more than half--57%--were said to contain at least some violence. And much of it was the kind that, according to the study, can desensitize kids and encourage imitation: violence divorced from the bad consequences it has in real life.

The study drew an outcry from network executives, who argued, with some justification, that they have reduced the amount of violence they air and have added warning labels for the little that remains. Indeed, a UCLA study (financed by the networks) last year found "promising signs" that levels of network violence are declining. And upon closer scrutiny, the new study's methodology does seem to overstate the case a bit. Nevertheless, it pins some hard numbers on a problem that is popping up increasingly in the public forum: What effect is TV violence having on kids? And what should we do about it?

Politicians of all stripes have jumped in. Democratic Senator Paul Simon has held well-publicized hearings on TV violence and first proposed that networks sponsor independent audits like last week's report. Bob Dole last year called for action against violence on TV as well as in movies and rock music. Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut last week joined the conservative Media Research Center in urging the networks to clean up the so-called family hour, the first hour of prime time each evening. President Clinton and Vice President Gore have both embraced the V chip and called for a summit meeting on TV violence with top network and cable executives at the end of February. The antinetwork rhetoric from many reformers sounds strikingly like that directed against another industry charged with making a harmful product. "The TV industry has to be socially responsible," says Harvard child psychiatrist Dr. Robert Coles. "We're now going after the tobacco companies and saying, 'Don't poison people.' It seems to me, the minds of children are being poisoned all the time by the networks. I don't think it's a false analogy."

The analogy depends, of course, on accepting the proposition that TV has a harmful effect on young viewers. Researchers have been sparring over that question for years, but the debate seems to have swung in favor of the antiviolence forces. The study released last week did no original research on the effect TV violence has on children's behavior. But it summarized a growing body of research and concluded that the link between TV violence and aggressive behavior is no longer in doubt.

Even if true, the exact nature and extent of that link is unclear. Is the effect of watching TV violence brief or lasting? Is TV as important a factor in fostering societal violence as economic poverty, bad schools and broken homes? And in any event, is it really possible--or desirable--to manage kids' exposure to a cultural environment that can never be entirely beneficial or benign? From gangster movies in the '30s to horror comics and rock 'n' roll in the '50s, pop culture has always been strewn with pitfalls for youngsters. Sheltering kids from such things is largely futile; most seem to survive in spite of it.

The current wave of concern about TV violence seems oddly timed. The violent action shows that flourished on TV a decade or so ago--The A-Team; Magnum, P.I.; Miami Vice--have largely disappeared. The few crime shows left are cerebral dramas like Law & Order and NYPD Blue, which, though grittier than the older shows, have little overt violence. The sniggering sex talk on network sitcoms is a far more alarming trend. But even if there are some shows that young kids should be shielded from, the question is whether all TV should be held to the standard of safe-for-children. If TV were to be scrubbed clean for kids, it would be a pretty barren place for adults.

The V chip offers what appears to be an easy solution to this problem. Rather than removing or trying to tone down objectionable shows, it enables parents simply to keep them out of kids' reach. The current V-chip technology, developed by a Canadian engineer named Tim Collings, is essentially a computer chip that, when installed in TV sets (added cost: as little as $1), can receive encoded information about each show. Parents can then program the TV set to block out shows that have been coded to indicate, say, high levels of violence. If, after the kids have gone to bed, parents want to watch Tori Spelling on a shooting spree, they can reverse the blocking by pushing one or more buttons.

The V chip will be welcomed by many parents who despair of monitoring the multitude of TV programs available to their kids. The device has already been a godsend for politicians--a way of seeming to take action on TV violence while avoiding sticky issues of censorship or government control. Most children's activists welcome the device, yet recognize it is not a panacea. "The V chip doesn't do anything to decrease violence," says Arnold Fege of the National Parent-Teacher Association. "There are parents who are not going to use it at all. But it does give parents some control."

Widespread use of the V chip is probably years off. New TV sets are not required to have them for at least two years (legal challenges from the networks are expected to extend that further), and there are still all those chipless RCAs and Sonys currently in people's living rooms. Every set in the house would have to have the V chip, or else kids could just go into the bedroom to watch forbidden shows. Some critics warn, moreover, that it's only a matter of time before kids learn how to break the code and counteract the blocking mechanism.

The trickiest problem of all is, Who will rate the shows, and how they will be rated? The telecommunications bill encourages the networks to devise their own rating system; if they haven't done so in a year, the fcc is empowered to set up a panel for creating one. One possible system is currently being tested in Canada. Programs are given a rating of from 0 to 5 in each of three categories: violence, sex and profanity. By setting their V-chip dial to numbers of their choice, parents can block out all shows with higher than that level of offensive material.

Some V-chip critics see the centralized rating concept as too rigid. They support instead one of several devices currently in development that enable parents to make their own choices of which shows to block out. fcc chairman Reed Hundt, a V-chip booster, contends that it will be only "the first of a slew of products. I predict remote-control devices with selection programs. There will be a variety of ways to receive TV."

Broadcasters, for their part, object that a ratings system mandated by the government threatens their free-speech rights. "A centralized rating system that is subject to review and approval by the government is totally inconsistent with the traditions of this country," says NBC general counsel Richard Cotton. "This legislation turns the fcc into Big Brother." Former CBS Broadcast Group president Howard Stringer argues, "The V chip is the thin end of a wedge. If you start putting chips in the television set to exclude things, it becomes an all-purpose hidden censor."

The rhetoric may invoke the First Amendment, but the networks' more pressing concern is the bottom line. The V chip will, inevitably, reduce the potential audience for shows marked with the scarlet letter. That means advertising revenue will go down. What's more, a violence label may scare off many advertisers and thus cause programmers to steer clear of provocative shows. "The thing nobody is taking into account," says Law & Order creator Dick Wolf, "is that there's going to be a V-chip warning on Homicide, NYPD Blue, Law & Order, ER, Chicago Hope--any of the adult dramas that deal with real-life substantive issues. Once that happens, you are going to have a television landscape that's far, far different from what you have today."

There is another possible scenario. If the networks and advertisers learn to live with a V rating, producers might find themselves liberated--able to produce even more adult fare, secure in the knowledge that children will be shielded from it. Which could, of course, lead either to more sophisticated adult fare or sleazier entertainment. Says Wolf: "If all these shows have warnings on them, you could have a situation where producers are saying to standards people at the networks, 'I've got a warning. I can say whatever I want. I can kill as many people as I want.' "

THEY'RE ALREADY KILLING A LOT, if the National Television Violence Study is to be believed. Billed as the "most thorough scientific survey of violence on television ever undertaken," the study not only found a surprisingly high percentage of violent shows; it also made some damning observations about the way violence is presented. According to the survey, 47% of the violent acts shown resulted in no observable harm to the victim; only 16% of violent shows contained a message about the long-term negative repercussions of violence; and in a whopping 73% of all violent scenes, the perpetrator went unpunished. These figures, however, were based on some overly strict guidelines: perpetrators of violence, for example, must be punished in the same scene as the violent act. By that measure, most of Shakespeare's tragedies would be frowned on; Macbeth, after all, doesn't get his comeuppance until the end of the play.

The study found significant variations in the amount of violence across the dial. On network stations, 44% of the shows contained at least some violence, vs. 59% on basic cable and 85% on premium channels like hbo and Showtime. Yet it was the broadcast networks that squawked the loudest. "Someone would have to have a lobotomy to believe that 44% of the programs on network television are violent," exclaims Don Ohlmeyer, NBC West Coast president. (Actually, the study referred to network stations, meaning that syndicated shows like Hard Copy were also included.) "Since I've been here, I can't think of a program we've had that's glorified violence, that hasn't shown the pain of violence and attempted to show there are other ways to resolve conflicts."

The researchers' definition of violence did, at least, avoid some of the absurdities of previous studies, in which every comic pratfall was counted. Violent acts were defined as those physical acts intended to cause harm to another; also included were verbal threats of physical harm as well as scenes showing the aftermath of violence. Thus, finding a body in a pool of blood on NYPD Blue counts as a violent act; Kramer bumping into a door on Seinfeld does not. A cartoon character whacking another with a mallet counts; but the accidental buffoonery of America's Funniest Home Videos doesn't.

Yet just one of these acts was enough to classify a program as violent. In addition, the survey covered a number of cable channels--among them USA, AMC, TNT, HBO and Showtime--whose schedules are filled with network reruns (including many action shows like Starsky and Hutch and Kung Fu) or theatrical films. This served to boost the overall totals of violent shows while masking the fact that violence in the most watched time periods--network prime time--has declined.

"We didn't want to get into a show-by-show debate," says Ed Donnerstein, communications and psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where most of the monitoring was done. "We didn't want to point fingers." George Gerbner, former dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication and a longtime chronicler of TV violence, agrees with the study's big-picture approach. "Anytime you give a name of a program, it lends itself to endless quibbling," he says. "The question is not what any one program does or doesn't do. The question is, What is it that large communities absorb over long periods of time?"

Whatever its defects, the study could have a major impact as development of the V chip begins. "This is the foundation of any rating system that will be developed," says Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts, the V chip's original champion in Congress. The irony is that some of the most objectionable shows, in the survey's view, are cartoons and other children's shows: they are the ones that portray violence "unrealistically," without consequences or punishment. "When you show a young kid somebody being run over and they pop back up without harm, that's a problem," says Donnerstein. Maybe so, but a kid who grows up without Batman or Bugs Bunny misses something else: a chance to engage in playful fantasy. And the V chip can't make up for that.

--Reported by Hannah Bloch/Washington, Georgia Harbison and William Tynan/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by HANNAH BLOCH/WASHINGTON, GEORGIA HARBISON AND WILLIAM TYNAN/NEW YORK AND JEFFREY RESSNER/LOS ANGELES