Parents Television Council believes V-Chips do not protect children from inappropriate content because programmers do not rate their programs properly. TV Watch believes PTC cooks its studies to make things seem more alarming than they really are.
According to PTC’s latest ratings study – its sixth – the TV-PG rating allows a great deal of inappropriate content into American living rooms.
“In only a two-week period (59 hours) of analyzed TV-PG rated shows there were a total of 637 instances of explicit language, sex, and violent content that aired during primetime,” reported PTC. “This is equivalent to a child being exposed to more than 10.8 incidents of explicit adult content per hour. In other words, a child watching TV-PG programs would have been exposed to explicit adult content every five -and-a-half minutes.”
PTC continued, “The data show that a child watching TV-PG programming within a two-week period would have witnessed 181 instances of adult sexual content, 239 instances of offensive language, and 217 instances of violence.”
TV Watch Executive Director Jim Dyke responded, “Once again the PTC is cooking the books to press their agenda with lawmakers and raise money for their organization. With a majority of parents overwhelmingly pleased with the television ratings and parental controls, these studies – which rely on faulty methodology and subjective analyses – are really just an organization struggling to remain relevant. But there is a real danger as legislators and regulators may unwittingly rely on this subjective analysis to erroneously influence public policy.”
TV Watch had some statistics of its own. It noted that polling reveals that 68% of parents use TV ratings when deciding what their children may or may not watch, and that 95% of that group says that the ratings are usually helpful.
