Word: ftc
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This, naturally, is where the Federal Trade Commission comes in. Last week the FTC released a report on how movie studios, music companies and video-game makers push violent products on children. Landing as it did in the middle of the campaign season, the report caught the attention of Washington at the highest levels of presidential ambition. Al Gore gave the entertainment companies six months to shape up their marketing practices or face unspecified retaliation from Washington. The Senate Commerce Committee, chaired by John McCain, held a hearing to examine the FTC conclusions. Senate colleague Joe Lieberman showed...
...commission's request, internal marketing documents and other evidence were provided by more than 60 companies, including Disney, Fox and Sony as well as Warner Bros. Films and Warner Music Group, both owned by Time Warner. After sifting through those, the FTC decided that the three industries often push violent product in places where young people are a large part of the audience. Though the report did not cite films or studios by name, it did find that R-rated films were advertised in high school newspapers, offered to teens through free preview screenings and advertised on programs watched heavily...
...FTC also decided that entertainment companies don't just accidentally rein in teens and children; they often target them deliberately in their marketing strategies. The report says an unnamed studio distributed flyers for an R-rated film to youth groups like the Camp Fire Boys and Girls. Video-game makers routinely identified kids under 17 as a big catch in media strategies for games rated M, for "mature" buyers. Dale Pollock, dean of the film school at the North Carolina School of the Arts, produced the 1996 film "Set It Off." It was violent, raw and rated R, but Pollock...
...ratings - for instance, for violence, sex, profanity or drug use - and that its ABC-TV network would no longer accept ads for R-rated movies during prime time before 9 p.m. Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, admitted to the committee that the FTC report identified some practices - like focus groups for 10-year-olds - that should end. But he insists that the ratings system adopted by the movie industry in 1968 is working as intended. "Eighty-one percent of parents are satisfied with the system," he told TIME, citing an FTC survey. "We must...
...after the FTC issued its report, South Carolina attorney general Charlie Condon called it a "smoking gun" that would allow him and other state attorneys general to sue the entertainment companies in the same way they successfully sued the tobacco industry. "They're going after these kids full bore," he says. "It's like an aspirin company marketing adult aspirin to children in violation of their own standards." But a class action of the kind that brought down the cigarette makers would be a hard case. While the connection between smoking and cancer is backed by solid medical evidence...