Statement on the Need for a Universal Media Rating System
to the United States Senate Governmental Affairs CommitteeIn connection with their Hearing
"Rating Entertainment Ratings: How Well Are They Working for Parents,
and What can be Done to Improve Them?"July 25, 2001
Professor Joanne Cantor, Ph. D.,
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Senator Lieberman and members of the Committee. My name is Joanne Cantor. I am sorry that I cannot appear before you in person, but long-standing family vacation plans force me to submit my comments in writing only. Since the mid-1970's, I have been a professor at the University of Wisconsin, focusing my teaching and research on the effects of the mass media, especially media violence, on children. In the mid-1990's, I participated in the National Television Violence Study(1), in which I studied the effects of media ratings and advisories on children. At the same time, I also conducted a national survey with the National PTA to explore what parents would find most helpful in a television rating system.(2) I have written a book titled "Mommy I'm Scared": How TV and Movies Frighten Children and What We Can Do to Protect Them,(3) that helps parents protect their children from the effects of media violence. I have also written several encyclopedia articles about media violence, about television and movie ratings, and about media ratings of all types.(4) Finally, I am the mother of a 12-year-old son, so I have personal experience with the use of media ratings. All of these experiences, I believe, put me in a position to comment knowledgeably on rating systems.
Evidence of the Harms of Media Violence
The need to protect children from unfettered access to media violence is unquestionable. As you have heard on many previous occasions, there is a large body of research that demonstrates that media violence has detrimental effects on children's psychological well-being, promoting the acceptance of violent solutions to problems, increasing desensitization to the harms of violence, increasing interpersonal hostilities, provoking intense anxieties and nightmares, and sometimes promoting the commission of violent acts. I attach a presentation I gave at last year's American Psychological Association Convention that summarizes what I consider to be the strongest aspects of this research.(5) (This paper is also available on my web site (www.joannecantor.com). I will not reiterate the research on harms here, but I would like to say a few things in rebuttal of the comments you are likely to hear from media lobbyists. First, these lobbyists will argue that there is no compelling evidence that media violence harms children. They will likely present testimony from the one rare academic social scientist who belittles the significance of the media violence research. Please keep in mind how much in the minority this person's view is. Second, the lobbyists will focus on the flaws or limitations of one study and claim that if this study has limited generalizability, the rest of the research is meaningless. The important thing to remember is the weight of the scientific evidence, not the opinion of any one psychologist or the findings of any one study. This is why the technique of meta-analysis is so important, because it combines in a scientific and statistical fashion the results of all the relevant studies and comes up with a conclusion that is based on the consensus of the evidence.
I call your attention to the latest meta-analysis of media violence research, which was published in The American Psychologist in May of this year by Professors Brad Bushman and Craig Anderson of Iowa State University.(6) This study shows once again that the link between viewing violence and aggressive behavior is significant. This relationship is observed in experiments (where participants are randomly assigned to view violence or not and their behavior is subsequently measured) as well as surveys (where individuals' normal viewing habits and aggressive behavior are both measured). This indicates that the relationship is not just a function of aggressive people preferring to view violence. Violence viewing increases viewers' aggressiveness. And, in spite of what the media lobbyists say, the article shows that the relationship is strong - stronger than the link between condom use and the prevention of sexually transmitted HIV, and stronger than the link between exposure to lead and lower IQ scores in children. No one doubts that condom use can save lives, and no one doubts that getting rid of lead in paint is essential. Yet these effect sizes are smaller than the effect size for media violence. It's high time to acknowledge that media-violence effects are strong and that parents and society need to find ways to reduce them.
More disturbingly still, Bushman and Anderson's study documents that as the evidence linking media violence to aggressive behavior has increased in both quantity and strength, the tendency of the press to downplay the results has also increased. The media have a conflict of interest here, because they make so much money selling media violence to youth(7). No wonder it's so hard to get the message across to the general public that parents need to be concerned.
I agree that school shootings have been terrible tragedies and that we need to do what we can to prevent more of these horrors from occurring in the future. However, we should not be focusing on criminal violence to the exclusion of other harms that are more common but receive less attention from the media. One problem with focusing on criminal violence is that it is impossible to do the ultimate study that the ardent skeptics and media lobbyists would demand. We can't randomly assign children early in their lives to watch different doses of violence on television and then 20 years later see which children committed violent crimes. But the same type of limitation also exists for medical research: We can't randomly assign groups of people to smoke differing amounts of cigarettes for 20 years, and then count the number of people who developed lung cancer.
Media violence researchers do longitudinal studies of children's media exposure and look at the types of behaviors they engage in over time. They also control for other factors, such as previous aggressiveness, family problems, and the like. They don't look at media violence in a vacuum; they examine whether there is a correlation between television viewing and violent behavior, even controlling for other influences. They also do experiments to make firmer causal connections. Like animal experiments in medical research, these are not necessarily naturally occurring situations, but such experiments fill the gaps we cannot fill otherwise. They are meant to show short-term effects, like increases in hostility or more accepting attitudes toward violence -- changes that we know increase the likelihood of violent actions, both in the short term and in the long run, and that are unhealthy effects in and of themselves.
If we can't prove that a particular crime was "caused" by a particular movie, we do have powerful evidence of the contribution of media violence to serious injuries. Not all of this evidence comes from isolated cases. To give an example, a recent national survey of Israeli middle-schools showed that when World Wrestling Federation was introduced to Israeli TV in 1994, the widespread imitation of the wrestlers' behavior produced an epidemic of serious playground injuries, including broken bones and concussions.(8) Although no one was accused of committing a crime, it would be difficult to argue that no child was harmed. The mayhem continued until the frequency with which the program aired was reduced and educators offered extensive counseling to counteract the show's impact. Research also tells us that children often have repetitive nightmares or develop sleep disturbances as a function of exposure to the wrong television programs or movies.(9) There's nothing criminal here, but such effects can be severely harmful to a child's physical and psychological well-being, and parents need ways of protecting their children from such effects.
The Role of Rating Systems
I agree that the most important influence on a child's development is, and should be parents. However, the media make it harder and harder to parent effectively, by bombarding our children with unhealthy images on TV, in videos, in music, in video games, and on the Internet. It is literally impossible for parents to preview all of this material, so it is essential that they be provided with easily understood information in advance, in order to make wiser choices about which types of content and in what amounts their children should consume.
Rating systems are one tool that can help parents, but the current situation is absurdly incomprehensible and confusing. As you can see from the Table I have attached, a concerned parent now needs to know and apply at least six different rating and advisory systems to keep up with the controversial content of television, movies, home video games, arcade games, and the Internet. [In addition, there is a virtually unknown advisory in place for positively indexing educational television programming.]
Let's take a look at these rating systems. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) movie rating system has been in place the longest and is the most well known. This system gives vague age guidelines for viewing, but gives no information about program content. Survey after survey, including the National PTA survey mentioned above, shows that parents prefer content information over age guidelines.(10) Moreover, the National Television Violence Study and other research has shown that the Motion Picture Ratings and other restrictive guidelines actually increase children's interest in viewing controversial programming.(11) MPAA President Jack Valenti is very proud of his own surveys that show that the majority of parents find the system "very useful" or "fairly useful." I would not disagree that part of the system is "fairly useful." The mother of a six-year-old can look at an R-rating and safely guess that the movie is inappropriate for her child. And since two-thirds of movies being made these days are rated R or higher,(12) this is a great time-saver. But how useful are the ratings of G, PG, and PG-13? Recent research has shown that even G-rated animated movies are surprisingly violent(13) and that there is very little difference in the content of movies rating PG and PG-13.(14) I would ask Mr. Valenti to please ask parents how useful the ratings of G, PG, and PG-13 are? My expectation is that these ratings will score very low. It is indeed a step in the right direction that many ads for movies are now including the reasons for a movie's rating. But these reasons should be part of the rating itself and be available everywhere the rating is displayed.
Now, for television. The current system of television ratings was the result of a compromise between the television industry and child advocacy groups. The age-based guidelines, TVY, TVY7, TVG, TVPG, TV14, and TVMA, may be supplemented by the letters V, S, L, D, and FV. Aside from being complicated, the major problem with this system is that the meanings of these letters and icons do not appear with the icons. In fact, they almost never appear anywhere. This system is the only major media rating system that has this unacceptable but easily remedied flaw. No wonder practically no one knows what the icons and letters mean! Research shows that the revised system is poorly understood. For example, in a national survey of parents conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation in April of 1999, a year and a half after the revised system was put in place, only three percent of parents knew that the content letters, FV, stood for "fantasy violence" and only two percent knew that D stood for suggestive or sexual dialog.(15) [An update released July 24, 2001, shows that in 2001, 14% know the meaning of FV and 5% know what D stands for.(16)] These results show that the public cannot learn a rating system if icons are expressed without comprehensible words that make them meaningful. What we have here is functioning as a "secret code" that few parents can interpret and many don't even know exits. The media's efforts to publicize the rating system have been woefully inadequate. In fact, research by the Annenberg Public Policy Center shows that in the year 2000, a smaller percentage of parents (50%) were aware that there was a television rating system than knew there was one in 1997 (70%).(17)
There are further problems with the TV rating system. NBC still refuses to go along with the compromise and uses only the age icons but not the content indicators. In addition, some program listing services have not adopted the new system. My local papers still use the original rating system without the content letters. And inexplicably, the ratings given in my local paper are different from the ratings that are readable by the V-chip. My newspaper always says that "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" is rated "TVM" [sic], but the rating transmitted through the television is TV14. Then there is the issue of whether producers are using consistent criteria to rate their shows. Research suggests that they are not.(18)
Adding even more to parents' difficulties in screening their children's media exposure, rating systems for other forms of media are entirely different. Music has a Parental Advisory sticker for "explicit content." This gives no indication of the type of explicit content or its level of severity. Video games have two different rating systems, one for home games and another for arcade games. The one for home games, the ESRB (Electronic Software Monitoring Board) system, gives explicit age guidelines, supplemented by a variety of content phrases, such as "comic mischief," or "mature sexual themes." The system for arcade games also has content phrases, with the level of that content indicated by one of three colored stickers: green ( "suitable for everyone"), yellow: ( "mild"), or red: ("strong"). In addition, there are many different rating systems for Internet content.
The result of this situation is a dizzying array of icons, letters, and numbers, that leaves most parents shaking their heads and wondering where to begin. How can they possibly cope with the overwhelming intrusion of media into their homes (via TV, radio, and computer), and the relentless marketing of other products that children can buy or consume elsewhere?(19)
It makes eminent sense to have an easily understood rating system that parents can count on when they make these important decisions.
I urge you to do whatever you can to give parents an easily comprehensible, reliable system for evaluating the appropriateness of their children's media choices. And please ensure that there are adequate resources to promote that system and to disseminate the information parents need in order to understand the severe health consequences of not properly guiding their children's media exposure.
Thank you.
Footnotes
1. National Television Violence Study, Volumes 1-3 (1996-1998). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.2. Cantor, J., Stutman, S., & Duran, V. (1996). What parents want in a rating system for television. Report of the National PTA, the Institute for Mental Health Initiatives, and the University of Wisconsin. Available at www.pta.org/programs/tvreport.htm.
3. Cantor, J. (1998). "Mommy, I'm scared": How TV and movies frighten children and what we can do to protect them. San Diego, CA: Harcourt.
4. Cantor, J. (in press). Rating systems for media. Encyclopedia of International Media and Communications (Academic Press). Federman, J., & Cantor, J. (in press). Ratings for movies. MacMillan Encyclopedia of Communication and Information. Cantor, J. (in press). Ratings for television programs. MacMillan Encyclopedia of Communication and Information. Cantor, J. (in press). The V-chip. MacMillan Encyclopedia of Communication and Information. Cantor, J. (in press). Media violence. Encyclopedia of Parenting. Cantor, J. (in press). Fear and the media. MacMillan Encyclopedia of Communication and Information. Cantor, J. (in press). Violence in films and television. Encyclopedia of International Media and Communications (Academic Press).
5. Cantor, J. (2000, August). Media violence and children's emotions: Beyond the "smoking gun." Paper presented at the American Psychological Association Convention, Washington, DC.
6. Bushman, B., & Anderson, C. (2001). Media violence and the American public: Scientific fact versus media information. American Psychologist, 56, 477-489.
7. Federal Trade Commission (2000, September). Marketing violent entertainment to children: A review of self-regulation and industry practices in the motion picture, music recording & electronic game industries. Washington, DC: Federal Trade Commission. Available at http://www.ftc.gov/reports/violence/vioreport.pdf .
8. Lemish, D. (1997). The school as a wrestling arena: The modeling of a television series. Communication, 22 (4), 395-418.
9. Owens, J., Maxim, R., McGuinn, M., Nobile, C., Msall, M., & Alario, A. (1999). Television-viewing habits and sleep disturbance in school children. Pediatrics, 104 (3), 552 (Abstract). Available at http//www.pediatrics.org/cgi/content/full/104/3/c27. Harrison, K., & Cantor, J. (1999). Tales from the screen: Enduring fright reactions to scary media. Media Psychology, 1, 97-116. Hoekstra, S. J., Harris, R. J., & Helmick, A. L. (1999). Autobiographical memories about the experience of seeing frightening movies in childhood. Media Psychology, 1 (2), 117-140. Cantor, J. (1998). "Mommy, I'm scared": How TV and movies frighten children and what we can do to protect them. San Diego, CA: Harcourt.
10. Cantor, J., Stutman, S., & Duran, V. (1996). What parents want in a rating system for television. Report of the National PTA, the Institute for Mental Health Initiatives, and the University of Wisconsin. Available at www.pta.org/programs/tvreport.htm. For a compilation of other surveys, see Cantor, J. (1998). Ratings for program content: The role of research findings. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 557, 54-69.
11. National Television Violence Study, Volumes 1-2 (1996-1997). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Bushman, B., and Stack, A. D. (1996). Forbidden fruit versus tainted fruit: Effects of warning labels on attraction to television violence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. 2, 207-226. Cantor, J. (1998). Ratings for program content: The role of research findings. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 557, 54-69.
12. Cantor, J. (1998). Ratings for program content: The role of research findings. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 557, 54-69.
13. Yokota, F., & Thompson, K. M. (2000). Violence in G-rated animated features. Journal of the American Medical Association, 283 (20), 2716-2720.
14. National Television Violence Study, Volumes 1-3 (1996-1998). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Cantor, J. (1998). Ratings for program content: The role of research findings. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 557, 54-69.
15. Kaiser Family Foundation. (1999). How parents feel (and what they know) about tv, the v-chip, and the tv ratings system. Menlo Park, CA: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. (www.kff.org).
16. Kaiser Family Foundation. (2001, July). Parents and the V-Chip 2001: A Kaiser Family Foundation Survey. Menlo Park, CA: The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
17. Woodard, IV, E. (2000). Media in the home 2000: The fifth annual survey of parents and children. Washington, DC: Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.
18. Kunkel, D. et al. (1998). Rating the ratings: One year out - An assessment of the television industry's use of V-chip ratings. Menlo Park, CA: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
19. Federal Trade Commission (2000, September). Marketing violent entertainment to children: A review of self-regulation and industry practices in the motion picture, music recording & electronic game industries. Washington, DC: Federal Trade Commission. Available at http://www.ftc.gov/reports/violence/vioreport.pdf .