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The film industry’s voluntary
movie rating system and why
it has endured
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the FTC’s First and Second Reports,
and how the movie industry responded to the First and how it was
treated by the Second
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Why the proposed Media Marketing Accountability Act
treads heavily on the spine of the
U.S. Constitution.
A factual catalogue offered to
the Governmental Affairs Committee
of the United States Senate
by
Jack
Valenti
President & Chief Executive Officer
The Motion Picture Association of America
Washington, D.C.
July 25, 2001
The film
industry’s voluntary movie rating system,
and why it has endured
Of the
current members of the United States Senate, only five resided
in that chamber when the film industry’s voluntary movie
rating system was born. The date was November 1, 1968.
In the ensuing thirty-two years and eight months, movie
ratings have become part of the daily life of the nation, with a
98% ‘recognition’ factor among American families.
In a
marketplace usually brooding over the fragility and the
brutishly short lives of products and enterprises, the rating
system has endured, buoyed by an ascending curve of parental
approval. Nothing
lasts almost thirty-three years in such a volatile marketplace
unless it is providing a visible benefit to the people it was
designed to serve -- in this case, the parents of America.
Is it
perfect? Of course
not. Perfection is nowhere to be found in anything made by
mortals. But
since 1969 in annual national surveys conducted by the Opinion
Research Corporation of Princeton, New Jersey, parents have
given the movie ratings an ever-rising level of approval.
Last year in September, 2000, the latest poll revealed
that 81% of parents
with children under 13 found the ratings Very Useful to Fairly
Useful in helping them make decisions about the movie going of
their young children.
That is a parental authority that must be invulnerable
against outside interference.
The Federal
Trade Commission, in the summer of 2000, undertook its own
separate, independent survey and reported that 80%
of parents were "satisfied" with movie ratings.
These are
massive parental endorsements.
The settled fact is that over these almost thirty-three
years the vast majority of parents have come to know the movie
rating system. They
use it. They find
it helpful.
During those
long years, as of this date, the rating board has rated 16,892
films. While
there is criticism about the ‘accuracy’ of the ratings of
individual films, never once have there been accusations
faulting the integrity of the system. There will always be disagreements about the rating of a
specific film. Frankly,
sometimes I privately take issue with a particular movie’s
rating. But if
there are errors in some ratings, it is a matter of a judgment
call, not an exile of integrity.
Let’s
discuss "accuracy."
In rating movies, we are not dealing with the purity of
Euclid’s geometric equations where the answers are always
clean-shaped and final. Vexing though it may be to social scientists,
Wall Street forecasters -- and movie raters -- they are
all equally confronted with the ghostly form of
"subjectivity," barren of Euclidean precision.
Finality and proof always lie beyond their grasp.
The reason why is simple.
None of them is divinely inspired enough to see clearly
what is not clearly seen.
Where does
one find accuracy in anything ‘subjective?’
How will a six year old boy behave when he becomes twenty
and under what circumstances would he turn "bad?"
What is too much violence?
Where is the line to be drawn?
How does one predict the future years of that six year
old boy who becomes briefly aggressive (as laboratory
experiments reveal) after watching action visuals?
When he becomes twenty is there sufficient connective and
causal evidence from the experiments that he will pick up a
Glock Nine and blow someone’s head off?
Plainly, when
there is no sublime absolute, when you walk down ill-lit
corridors, what do social scientists, Wall Street forecasters
and movie raters do?
They draw smudged lines.
They estimate. They surmise. They
leap into a good faith of judgments, without any conclusive and
reassuring proof that they are right.
For example, social scientists make fragile estimates
which emerge from a laboratory experiment. But
they cannot begin to fathom nor can they measure with any
precision how a ‘human being’ will act and react in the
real, hurly burly world beyond the confined landscape of the
lab. To
put it bluntly, the computer, a magical piece of technology, can
do everything except one thing:
It cannot predict human behavior.
Neither can anything or anyone else.
So, how does
the Rating Board deal with subjectivity and accuracy? All the members of the Rating Board are parents.
They look at each film through the lens of a parent’s
eye. And before the
Board comes to a final decision, each rater tries to answer this
question: "Is
the rating I am about to apply to this movie one that most
parents in America would agree is the correct rating?"
To go beyond that is to reach for immaculate finality
which, alas, is not available.
Consider
this: in 2000, the
Surgeon General of the United States conducted the largest
excavation of extant research into what incites violence in
young people. The
Surgeon General’s final report put "media watching"
near the bottom of "risk factors" which contribute to
anti-social behavior.
This report ought to be required reading for anyone
perplexed about the origins of the source-bed from which violent
youngsters emerge.
What about
violence among juveniles?
The latest FBI crime data reveals that of the some 70
million juveniles in the nation (under 17 years old), only 1/16th
of one percent of them have been arrested for a serious crime
(though not necessarily convicted).
This means that 99.84% of all juveniles have never been
involved in serious crime.
Moreover, juvenile crime, according to the FBI, has
declined some 28% in the last five years.
The National
Safety Council has reported that the safest place for children
today is the school and the schoolyard.
The great majority of the deaths of children occurs in
automobile accidents.
We do not
point accusatory fingers at anyone.
We do know that parents are being bombarded in this
cyberspace age with literally an avalanche of information,
entertainment, facts, data, chat rooms, and the tide rolls on.
It is not easy being a parent in these times when so much
is available to so many and when so few of us can sort it all
out. Parents
with young children deserve a never-ending compassion from the
general public.
It is a fact
that all parents are not the same, all children are not alike,
and that only parents know the emotional, maturity and
intellectual level of their children.
Which is why parental decisions are best left to
individual parents.
The First and
Second Reports
of the Federal Trade Commission
and
How the movie industry responded to the
First Report, and how it was treated
in the Second Report
The First
Report of the Federal Trade Commission was made public on
September 11, 2000. In
that Report the FTC pointed some accusatory fingers at a number
of films whose marketing plans were, in the FTC’s judgment,
flawed. Some
of these plans involved marketing R-rated films to young
children.
My own
response was that some of the criticisms by the FTC were not off
the mark. Some
of the marketing actions were indefensible, as I publicly
conceded.
On September
27, within sixteen days of the publication of the FTC’s First
Report, the member companies of the Motion Picture Association
of America conveyed to the Commerce Committee of the Senate a
12-Point Set of Initiatives which confronted the FTC’s
criticisms and vowed to revise movie marketing designs to
coincide with the Initiatives.
Those Initiatives are in place and working. They include the creation of Compliance Committees
within each company whose mandate it is to monitor the marketing
plan of every film released by that company.
Moreover, each Compliance Committee would report to the
Chief Executive Officer of the MPAA on a frequent basis as to
how they were carrying out its responsibilities.
Additionally,
we pledged we would offer expanded information to parents about
"the reasons for the rating of a specific film."
Those reasons are now resident in all newspaper ads of
reasonable size, are available on web-sites of the MPAA and each
individual company.
We believe it is right and useful to make sure that
parents can determine the "why" of a rating, before
they decide whether or not they want their children to see that
movie.
The Second
Report of the FTC was made public in April, 2001.
The Commission commended the movie industry in seventeen
separate citations
for improving the marketing of movies
and the industry’s commitment to continue its marketing
scrutiny. Is
there room for more improvement?
Yes, there is. We are doing our dead level best to make sure that we
redeem the public pledges we made.
But more
importantly, the Federal Trade Commission in both its First and
Second Report, and in its testimony before the House
Commerce’s subcommittee on Telecommunications on July 20,
2001, made clear its firm conviction that "because of First
Amendment protections afforded these products, the Commission
continues to believe that vigilant (voluntary) self-regulation
is the best approach to ensuring that parents are provided with
adequate information……"
Bear that
sober admonition in mind as we move now to proposed Senate
legislation entitled:
The
Media Marketing
Accountability Act of 2001
And
why it treads heavily on
the spine of the United States Constitution
The first
question to be asked is: Why
does this proposed legislation turn a blind eye to the FTC
Reports’ clear and readily absorbed statement that the best
approach is self-regulation which insures that parents are
provided with adequate information on which to base their
decisions about their children’s movie going?
This
legislative proposal sanctions the intrusion of the FTC into a
voluntary rating system.
The bill specifically and baldly states:
"The Federal Trade Commission shall prescribe rules
that define with specificity the acts or practices that are
deceptive acts or practices under Section 101."
Whatever its sponsors may declare, this FTC empowerment
clearly trespasses on the ‘content’ of First Amendment
protected films which is a frontal attack on the Constitution.
Moreover, the
bill immunizes those
producers who do not
rate their films, and penalizes
those producers who do voluntarily rate their films and give
information to parents.
This would infect, fatally, the movie rating system.
Why would sane producers continue to submit their films
for voluntary rating when they could be subjected to fines of
$11,000 per day per violation of necessarily broad subjective
rules set down by a government regulatory agency? The bill would inevitably cause abandonment of the voluntary
MPAA ratings system, which has worked so well for so long.
The bill also suffers from the
prospect of a stern scrutiny by the Supreme Court of the United
States. In
Lorillard v. Reilly, a recent decision several weeks ago
revolving on the right of a company to advertise, the High Court
said that retailers and manufacturers have a strong First
Amendment interest in "conveying truthful information about
their products to adults."
The Court further said that the governmental interest in
protecting children from harmful material doesn’t justify
suppressing speech to adults, citing the decision in Reno v.
American Civil Liberties Union as well as citing Butler v.
Michigan, which said…."incidence of this enactment is to
reduce the adult population…to reading only what is fit for
children."
Also keep in
mind that the recent Lorillard case cited above did not involve products protected by the First Amendment.
Creative material, movies, etc. are fully
protected by the First Amendment which certifies that this
bill, if passed, would be ‘dead on arrival’ in the first
federal court to hear the case.
Moreover, if the Supreme Court decisions cited above mean
anything, they mean that under the canopy of the First
Amendment, creative material will be more securely protected by
the High Court from assaults by the federal government and its
regulatory agencies.
A
Summary of the movie industry’s
commitment to
Parents:
For almost thirty-three years, the movie industry has been offering
advance cautionary warnings to parents.
The voluntary movie rating system has endured for over a
third of a century for one simple reason:
It is provisioning parents with information which parents
count as valuable in helping them make their own parental
decisions about the films they want their children to see or not
to see. If the
movie rating system was not suitable to parents, if it was laggard
in redeeming its obligations in aiding parents with their
movie-going decisions, it would not be alive today.
What the movie rating system does is what the Federal Trade Commission
urges the Congress to understand, that robust and vigilant
voluntary industry self-regulation of First Amendment protected
creative material is the best way to help parents.
The FTC has repeatedly, in respectful language, cautioned
the Congress not to over-run the free speech barricades of the
Constitution. It’s
a joyous fact that the First Amendment is the one clause which
guarantees all others in the greatest document ever struck off by
the hand and brain of man.
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