An Extreme Makeover Is Needed

Tim Winter is the president of the Parents Television Council, a nonpartisan education organization advocating responsible entertainment.

Updated November 21, 2013, 5:35 PM

Parents are rightly concerned by the magnitude of graphic sex, violence and profanity across all forms of media today. The entertainment industry refuses to take any responsibility, instead insisting that the burden of shielding children from explicit material should rest solely on parents.

The dirty little secret is that entertainment executives are financially rewarded when they rate content inaccurately for younger audiences.

In the wake of the Newtown tragedy, some entertainment executives met with Vice President Biden and said afterwards that they have a “longstanding commitment to provide parents with the tools necessary to make the right viewing decisions for their families.”
Those “tools” are a cadre of content ratings systems. But in order to be helpful, each system must be accurate, consistent, transparent and publicly accountable. In fact, they are none of these things, and they’re faulty to the point of being fraudulent.
The industry itself determines the age rating for every entertainment product. And the dirty little secret is that its members are financially rewarded when they rate content inaccurately for younger audiences. PG-13 films make more money than R films, and most sponsors rightfully won’t buy advertisements on TV-MA (mature audience only) programs.
The result is apparent. New research from the Annenberg Center found there is as much gun violence in PG-13 films as in R-rated films. And research from the Parents Television Council notes that every single network series on broadcast television is rated TV-14 or younger – even those with graphic beheadings, bodies cut in half, fungi-infested corpses, brutal torture and, unbelievably, programs that use the sexual exploitation of children and rape as humor.
The reality is that the industry’s concern about shielding children from explicit content begins and ends at its wallet. And with more than 3,000 medical and sociological studies in the last 50 years demonstrating that children are affected by the media content they consume, these are hardly the “tools” parents can rely on.
The entire content ratings system must be reformed.