Presswatchl Salty V-Chips
Cony, John
Salty V-Chips by John Corry I t was not supposed to happen. Conservatives are now calling for government censorship, a notion that until recently was advocated only by liberals. When Congress was...
...Ralph Reed grew so testy on "Crossfire" that he accused Nadine Strossen of advocating "bestiality...
...It cannot be done other than by government fiat...
...Competition was setting in...
...Many flowers of the Republican Party, along with their allies in the Christian Coalition, are joining with discredited liberals, radical feminists, and an assortment of social engineers to undermine the First Amendment with some absolutely harebrained proposals...
...The broadcasters would be given a year to develop the rating code by themselves, and if they did not, the Senate said, the federal government would appoint a committee to do it for them...
...Moreover, while there are something like 15,000 bulletin boards, or newsgroups, on Usenet, most do not store and transmit digitized images...
...If you paid close attention, it might even have suggested the opposite...
...The little boy on Time's cover would have had to steal his father's driver license, Xerox it, scan it into the Internet, send a credit card number, and then find a way of explaining to his parents why they were getting the bill...
...Then, the day after they struck out at violence, they decided to go all out against smut...
...The old liberal demagogue told the networks not to forget that "they don't own the airwaves...
...In 1993, nine bills to curb violence on television were introduced in the Democratic Congress...
...Inevitably, there will be battles over who sets the standards...
...Actually, there has been porn on the Internet for a long time, and some of its distributors have been imprisoned for violating anti-obscenity laws...
...Senator Howard Metzenbaum was even blunter...
...They even wanted them to continue...
...The director of the Christian Coalition seemed to be lining up with Catharine MacKinnon...
...When Congress was controlled by Democrats, it was full of proposals to stifle free speech...
...Later, still arguing with Strossen, Sununu raised this to "half a dozen clicks," whereupon Kinsley finally interrupted...
...Hearings were held in both the House and Senate...
...The vote for the V-chip proved that, and now there is no telling where the censorious zeal may strike next...
...This means you may be prosecuted for using e-mail to tell your brother-in-law, say, that something he did has left you "pissed off...
...The study, conducted at Carnegie Mellon University, found that "83.5 percent of all images posted on the Usenet are pornographic...
...42 The American Spectator September 1995 Thus the 83.5 percent figure seemed to melt away...
...That same year, at a Senate hearing on television and violence, Byron Dorgan and Conrad Burns argued about the movie Rudy...
...But, as Orrin Hatch said, the game was to show who would stand most firmly against pornography...
...However, there is not the slightest chance that broadcasters will, or can, develop a uniform rating code...
...Cyberporn," the headline read, and underneath that: "Exclusive: A new study shows just how pervasive and wild it really is...
...Oneman's porn is another man's magazine illustration—a fact that should make Congress hesitate before it tries to restrict either violence on television or pornography in cyberspace...
...Charles Grassley cited it when he held a copy of the magazine aloft in the Senate, and defended his support for the Exon bill...
...It's a political exercise, and I'm against it...
...An agitated John Sununu, arguing with Nadine Strossen, the president of the American Civil Liberties Union, said you needed only "a few clicks" to pull up filthy material...
...Bureaucrats would apply their own standards to determine what is appropriate for the rest of us to see...
...The V-chip would then be programmed so that it blocked all broadcasts that a rating code deemed offensive...
...Then he said that Michael Kinsley, presumably experimenting, had done it "with five clicks the other night...
...ming each year, and it is absurd to think that broadcasters could devise a ratings system that would apply to all of them...
...Commentators who denounced Jesse Helms for attempting to censor artists—actually, he was only saying that the government should not have to pay their bills—cheerfully accepted Congress's far more serious attacks on the networks...
...Reed appeared to want that, too...
...Nightline" accepted, and opened its program with Marty Rimm, who had led the Carnegie Mellon research team...
...A researcher from the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania told a House subcommittee in 1993 that "the most violent genre" she had found in a survey of network programming was made up of the variety shows...
...Senators, though, professed shock when they peeked inside Exon's folder—it had a red label on it that said, "Caution"—and decided they had to do more, especially since a national audience was watching on C-Span...
...they are anti-sex as well...
...The history here is complicated, stretching back to the early days of television, but it is connected by a single idea: that bureaucrats know what is best for us...
...The principal Carnegie Mellon researcher, an undergraduate in electrical engineering, had gathered most of his data from the adult bulletin boards...
...But in fact they are not, and otherwise sensible people are doing foolish things...
...the chips would allow parents to lock out programs that presumably are unsuitable for children...
...The ACLU president, of course, had done no such thing, and it may be that Reed was angry because only minutes before he had been made to look foolish and perhaps even sinister...
...It is an article of liberal faith that violence on television must be stamped out, no matter what the cost...
...He was working at his computer, and supposedly had just seen something unspeakable on the screen...
...What Congress giveth, it can taketh away...
...But the question is, what do we mean by violence, and who or what would define it...
...You will all bum in hell" is one of their favorites...
...Under the circumstances, the government committee would be sure to step in...
...In June the Senate voted to require manufacturers to install computer chips—the so-called V-chips—into new television sets...
...James Exon, the Nebraska Democrat, turned up on the Senate floor with a folder full of dirty pictures that his staff had copied off the Internet...
...Under the Republicans, things were supposed to get better...
...Reed gave an ambiguous answer, and so Kinsley asked him again...
...In theory, broadcasters would transmit a signal with each program, indicating whether it contained violent or sexual content...
...Time magazine soon came out with a wide-eyed, open-mouthed, apparently horrified, but otherwise angelic little blue-eyed boy on its cover...
...It was as if they had walked into an adult book store in a seedy neighborhood, and ignored the public library a few blocks away...
...Pedophilia, bestiality, vaginal and rectal fisting, sadomasochism," he intoned, and then came the voice of Ted Koppel: "Now, it's the kind of material you and your kids can see with just the click of a button...
...The finding, as reported by Time, was much noted...
...In fact, he repeated the question three times, but Reed remained ambiguous...
...All he had managed to pull up, he said, was a Playboy centerfold...
...Enthusiasm for the V-chip was swept along by the desire to regulate violence on television, long a passion of congressional liberals, although always resisted in the past by conservatives...
...These included "TV's Funniest Commercials" and the 25th anniversary of Rowan and Martin's "Laugh-In...
...The radical feminist law professor had praised the Carnegie Mellon study...
...Ralph Reed, the director of the Christian Coalition, used it when he argued on television for government action...
...As filthy material, however, this wasn't much, no matter what Sununu thought...
...Consequently, CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox all announced that they would "voluntarily" run parental advisories during and after "excessively violent" programming...
...Strossen, however, has pointed out that MacKinnon and her followers are not only anti-pornography...
...Senator Paul Simon told the television industry: "There are two choices—censorship or voluntary conduct...
...The Carnegie Mellon researchers had found most of the pornographic images exactly where they might be expected to find them...
...If two Senators cannot agree on a movie, while a researcher from the distinguished Annenberg School finds that variety shows are violent, the futility of trying to establish any uniform rating system should be apparent...
...It's kind of a game, to see who can be the most against pornography and obscenity," Orrin Hatch said sourly...
...Putnam's Sons...
...Cyberspace is more impenetrable than that, a point nicely illustrated later that week on "Crossfire...
...MacKinnon, as always, called for censorship...
...Anti-porn hunters, for example, often post messages on these so-called adult bulletin boards...
...They voted 84-16 to impose criminal penalties on anyone who intentionally annoys or bothers anyone else with an "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy or indecent" comment, request, or suggestion over a computer network...
...N onetheless, you do not see that material with just the click of a button...
...they have a franchise...
...Further down in its story, though, Time had noted another Carnegie Mellon finding: that pornographic image files represented only 3 percent of the traffic on the Usenet bulletin boards, called newsgroups, while the Usenet represented only 11.5 percent of the traffic on Internet...
...Hatch was one of the few conservatives who stood firm against government regulation, and he was right about it being a game...
...These adult bulletin boards charge fees, accept credit cards, and usually demand proof of age—a driver's license will do—before they let you order anything shocking...
...Passions are rising, and some of them are unhealthy...
...One had a vision of speech codes or worse...
...It was hard to tell what, if anything, it meant...
...Republican Burns said it would make fine family viewing on television...
...Democrat Dorgan said it would not...
...There are more than 11 million hours of television programJohn Corry, a former New York Times media critic, is the author of My Times: Adventures in the News Trade (GrossetfG.P...
...The ACLU seems to be taking a sounder position here than the Christian Coalition...
...Time offered "Nightline" exclusive coverage of its report...
...F earful, however, that a vote against the V-chip might be interpreted as a vote against family values, many conservatives reversed their positions...
...Michael Kinsley had asked him whether he wanted to keep smut away from adults as well as from children...
...11 The American Spectator September 1995 43...
...As Newsweek reported, "In adopting parental advisories, the networks have taken a modest first step—when what may be needed is a giant leap...
...It was obvious they had been coerced, but the press, our putative guardian of free speech, still applauded...
...N evertheless, Congress is still trying...
...This meant that less than one-half of 1 percent—or 3 percent of 11.5 percent—of all the messages on Internet were associated with the newsgroups that peddled pornographic pictures...
...The question pornography poses in cyberspace," she wrote in the Georgetown Law Journal, "is the same one it poses everywhere else: whether anything will be done about it...
...These are the twin poles in the totalitarian thinking of commissars and gauleiters...
...n fact, the new study was not entirely exclusive, and it did not really show how pervasive or wild cyberporn really is...
...they disperse words and not pictures...
...Moreover, some of these messages were surely benign...
Vol. 28 • September 1995 • No. 9
