Word: chip
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
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...
...other side's fees. The Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Communications Commission loom in his columns as especially power hungry and antiquated. In practice, however, his anti-interventionist instincts aren't so tidy. Forbes has railed against industrial policy, for example, decrying the government-sponsored Sematech chip consortium and the Clinton Pentagon's development of flat-panel computer displays. Yet he heartily endorses Kemp-style enterprise zones that, whatever their worthy aims, amount to a textbook use of government subsidies to improve upon markets...
Efforts to curtail indecency have been far more efficient in Germany. Starting in 1993 the country's leading TV manufacturer voluntarily included V chips in new sets. The chip can automatically block out movies that the German film-industry board has deemed unacceptable for young audiences. The chip also filters out all TV shows--including soft-core porn--that individual stations decide are potentially inappropriate. The FSF, a TV industry watchdog group, frequently guides networks in scheduling. In December 1994 it convinced the RTL network to run the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers on a weekly rather than daily basis, following...