DALLY NEWS / SUNDAY, AUGUST 8, 1993 / 

Television and children
best enjoyed separately

    Maybe it's true, as critics of televised violence believe, that the gore in the boob tube spills over into the streets.
     That's not a good enough reason to beg for censorship. The government has no more business telling people what they can broadcast or watch than it has telling them what they can write or read.
     If violence on television is bad for children, parents should control it. Not bureaucrats.
     A swarm of legislators is buzzing with indignation over television content. Sen. Paul Simon, D-Ill., told an audience of industry executives Monday in Beverly Hills that they had just 60 days to mop up the blood or someone would do it for them.
     On Wednesday, Rep. John Bryant, D-Texas, introduced a bill that would establish anti-violence standards and penalize offenders with fines up to $25,000 and possible loss of their licenses. The bill would allow the Federal Communications Commission to control not only broadcast television but also radio, cable and satellite transmissions. The next day, Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., proposed a similar bill in the Senate.
     Also on Thursday, Edward Markey, D-Mass, and Jack Fields, R-Texas, sponsored a bill that would require television sets be built with a programmable chip that could block out certain precoded broadcasts. Markey is the chairman and Fields the ranking Republican member of the House telecommunications subcommittee.
     As usual, there's no dearth of regulators eager to oblige.
     FCC Chairman James Quello said he'd be delighted to police violence the same way the FCC does indecency, if only he had a law to enforce.
     There's the problem. The government's power to control the content of broadcasts,a power it doesn't have over print media, is the result of a technological accident. With a limited number of frequencies available for broadcase, especially for television, believers in regulation argued successfully that the only way to allocate them was by government license, and with the right to license came a right to control.

     A necessary step in that argument is now missing. Progress in cable and satellite technology means the number of channels is no longer limited, in any practical sense. Instead of expanding control over more media and more subjects, the government should be stepping out of the licensing racket entirely. Broadcast licenses are as much a violation of the spirit of the First Amendment as publishers' licenses would be.
     The easiest way to solve the problem of children and television is just not to have them in the house at the same time. That was an easy choice for us to make when our son was born (in 1972). I'm a Marxist when it comes to TV - Groucho, that is, who said he found television very educational because whenever someone turned it on, he went into the other room and read a book. And my husband's family had never had a set, so we'd never bothered to get one.
     Most people, though, aren't willing to give up television for themselves, so they need a way to limit their children's access. That's harder with a television set, which a family either does or does not have, than it is with books or magazines that are bought selectively and can be kept away from the kids, if that seems appropriate. So the idea of a programmable chip, which can be used to lock out anything parents don't believe their children should see, is a sensible compromise. That's like a rule requiring auto manufacturers to put seat belts in their cars.
       But it's not part of the deal to have the government deciding which programs should be coded "violent." Real life is violent too, and consequently so are news programs and documentaries. I wouldn't want
to subject some unfortunate functionary to the irresistible temptation of sparing the public exposure to, say, the videotape of a police beating, or the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia, or some nasty escapade our own government might get up to in the future.
     And if there's no proper way to limit the presentation of real violence, what's the point? The argument for limiting children's viewing is that all this fictional violence is harmful because children think it's real.
     "Un until age eight, children have a very difficult time differentiating between fantasy and reality," panelist Leonard Eron told the Beverly Hills conference. Eron is a professor of psychology at the University or Michigan.
    I don't buy that, and neither did ABC vice-president Christine Hikawa.
     "When cartoons like 'Tom and Jerry' are lumped in together with movies like 'I Spit on Your Grave,' their (the researchers') credibility goes out the window as far as ' I'm concerned," Hikawa said.
     On the rare occasions when our family stayed somewhere that had a television, Peter was allowed to indulge himself with all the cartoons he wanted. After one such binge, when he was about four years old, he was retelling in loving detail all the varieties of mayhem wreaked upon a hapless and indestructible mutt by some devilishly clever cat.
     Naturally I didn't want him to grow up to be a monster, so I tried to tell him it wasn't nice to be unkind to the sweet little puppy.
     Mothers are a real drag sometimes.
     "Mommy," he explained patiently, "it's not about the dog."
     He knew what fiction was, and had a quite respectable grasp of such literary conceits as protagonist and point of view, although not the names by which they are called.
     Even younger children have a clear understanding of "pretend." In a course on cognitive development I studied conversations between a mother and her 2 1/2-year-old daughter. At one point in their pretend play, the child dropped out of her pretend role as a hospital nurse and in her own voice instructed her mother (who dutifully complied) as to how she wanted the mother to act out the role of the patient, played by a stuffed animal. She could not only recognize theater, she knew how to direct it.
     Psychologists say children imitate what they see on television, at a much younger age than parents give them credit for. On the other hand, children understand much more than psychologists give them credit for ... if parents help them.
     But as Eton says, some parents don't, and that's why he doesn't believe parental advisories will make any difference.
     "The kids we're after aren't the ones who have parents at home. They don't have parents who care about them," Eron said.
     I'm very much afraid he's right about that. Children need human oarents, not electronic ones.