Rockefeller Irate About TV Violence
But Playing Clip from FX’s The Shield Backfires at Senate Hearing
By Multi Channel News Staff -- Multichannel News, 6/26/2007 4:20:00 PM MT
Washington -- Sen. John D. (Jay) Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), the Senate’s most vocal critic of excessive TV violence, tried to convince skeptics of content regulation Tuesday by rolling a seedy clip from FX program The Shield that showed a male police officer forced at gunpoint to perform oral sex on a male gang member.
But Rockefeller’s strategy to rally support from Senate Commerce Committee members appeared to backfire as the shockingly crude scene from the award-winning basic-cable channel didn’t appear to produce the expected outcry that things on TV had spun totally out of control.
“I can’t for the life of me figure out how it is that showing what [Sen. Rockefeller] believes to be indecent material on national TV at 10:35 in the morning is going to solve the problem,” said Sen. John Sununu (R-N.H.), in an apparent reference to C-SPAN3’s live coverage of the hearing.
Rockfeller chaired the TV-violence hearing, substituting for chairman Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii). Although scheduled as the lead witness, Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin, who shares Rockefeller’s concerns, could not attend due to health problems of his newborn son.
Rockefeller -- who advocates giving the FCC the authority to curb excessive violence on broadcasting and cable -- vowed to produce a TV-violence bill within a few weeks as his answer to an industry that faults parents both for failing to block inappropriate content and for forgetting to do a better job of supervising the viewing habits of their children.
“I think this is cowardly,” Rockefeller said, adding that his goal is stop excessively violent content from even being made. “Parents don’t want more tools. They want content off the air.”
Congress, Rockefeller said, had a “moral obligation” to stem TV violence despite the advice of constitutional law experts like Harvard’s Laurence Tribe that courts will strike down legislation with a content-based purpose that also poorly defines the content to be curbed or banned.
“Giving the power to government isn't the solution,” Tribe said.
But Rockefeller disagreed, saying, “We can find these lines and put bright markers on them. Doing nothing, to this senator, is not an option.”
Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) reminded Rockefeller that the U.S. Supreme Court has routinely invalidated laws and regulations that clashed with First Amendment free speech protections.
“I think we have to tread a lot softer than you indicate we can,” Stevens said.
Forcing cable operators to sell channels one by one -- an a-la-carte system favored by Martin -- could backfire on its proponents, said Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Oer.)
“I suspect that we will lose a number of children’s programming if we go to an a-la-carte business model,” Smith said.
Rebates for Blocking Content?
07/12/2007Rockefeller to Push Cable-Content Bill
02/27/2006DTV Delay Gains Ground
01/23/2009TV-Violence Measure Clears Committee
09/24/2000
