FCC Takes New Look at TV Rating System, ‘Parents’ Group Delighted

For more than two decades, television networks have been labeling programs with ratings, designed to signal whether a show contains sexual or violent content, or both, and to signal whether a specific program is appropriate for viewing by children or other age groups. But on Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission announced that it will take a new look at those ratings, to see whether they accurately describe the content of those shows, according to a report by the Broadcasting and Cable site.

The announcement came in response to an order included in the omnibus spending bill passed on February 15—the same bill that headed off a second government shutdown.

The provisions in that bill related to immigration and building new barriers on the United States-Mexico grabbed most of the national headlines. But the bill also ordered the FCC to review the TV ratings system, to find out “the extent to which the rating system matches the video content that is being shown and the ability of the TV Parental Guidelines Oversight Monitoring Board to address public concerns,” a summary of the bill said.

The order delighted the right-wing Parents Television Council—a group founded in 1995 by conservative activist and media gadfly L. Brent Bozell III. 

“We’re absolutely thrilled,” Tim Winter, current PTC president, told the Washington Times. “Never, ever once has there been any oversight as to whether this system is doing what is promised to parents.”

The group’s spokesperson, Melissa Henson, said that PTC hoped that the FCC would make major changes to the TV ratings system

“That's certainly our hope," Henson said. “At least in producing this report it'll sort of blow the cover off of what really amounts to a very fraudulent and self-serving system that Hollywood has had in place now for twenty years."

PTC has claimed that 81 percent of TV comedy shows that are rated as appropriate for children include “sexually charged language.”

"We have certainly seen over the last several years an increase in sexualizing content, especially for young girls,” Winter told the Christian Post

The FCC will now solicit public comments on the TV rating system, before reporting back to Congress within the next 90 days.

When the FCC solicited public comments in the run-up to its vote repealing net neutrality regulations in 2017, however, the system was deluged with fake comments, about 500,000 of them from accounts based in Russia, as AVN.com reported. Many of the fake comments were attributed to the stolen identities of actual Americans, both living and deceased.

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