At first glance, the Federal Communications Commission's new report says that television violence makes children more aggressive, and that present policies do not protect them.

The evidence "indicates that the current technology 'fix,' including but not limited to consumer understanding of the technology and voluntary ratings system, is not effective in protecting children from violent programming," the agency concludes.

The FCC's recommended remedies include allowing consumers to pick and choose which cable channels to buy "a la carte," opt-in/out packages for cable package buyers, or Congressional laws restricting violent programming to late hours.

But while the Report on Violent Programming and Its Impact on Children presents a disturbing overview of the TV viewing habits of toddlers, its fine print is far more tentative. A second reading suggests that the document, released this week, hedges on firm analytical conclusions about the problem.

Facts and impacts

The Report opens with overview data:

• The average American household has a television set turned on for 8 hours and 11 minutes daily.
• Children watch an average of between two and four hours of TV every day.
• Up to two thirds of American children have a television set in their bedroom, depending on their age.
• Most children will have spent about three school years in front of a television set by the time they enter the first grade.

The Report then cites three possible negative behaviors stemming from television violence watched at these levels of frequency:

• Children imitate the aggressive behavior they see on television. The FCC survey cites the work of psychology professor Craig Anderson, who says that TV violence triggers "increasing physiological arousal" and "an automatic tendency to imitate observed behaviors." University of Madison Wisconsin behavioral psychology professor Joanne Cantor concurs, quoted as suggesting that media violence has a wide range of bad effects on children, from putting them in a "nasty mood" to causing them to interpret neutral behavior as an attack.
• Youngsters become increasingly desensitized to violence and develop "normative beliefs that aggression is acceptable."
• Kids become disturbed as a result of violent TV watching. Cantor asserts that "media violence makes children fearful, a condition expressed as a general sense that the world is dangerous or through nightmares and other sleep disturbances," according to the report.

The FCC Report also cites MRI brain mapping studies that conclude that "[n]ormal adolescents who had a higher level of violent media exposure" suffer from "reduced levels of cognitive brain function" and that "[a]ggressive behavior can be associated with higher levels of violent media exposure," and "[a]ggressive adolescents show less cognitive brain activity than normal adolescents do."

But the Commission's overview also concedes that much of the social scientific community stops short of finding a "cause-and-effect" relationship between negative children behavior and TV violence. It cites a recent Federal Trade Commission study's concluding comments:

"Most researchers and investigators agree that exposure to media violence alone does not cause a child to commit a violent act, and that it is not the sole, or even necessarily the most important, factor contributing to youth aggression, anti-social attitudes, and violence. Although a consensus among researchers exists regarding the empirical relationships, significant differences remain over the interpretation of these associations and their implications for public policy."

The FCC report also summarizes the work of media violence skeptic Michael Males of the University of California at San Diego. According to the Commission, Males questions studies that find a "statistically significant" link between violent television and violent behavior. Often phrases such as "statistically significant" signify little more than the fact that some of the behavior did not happen by chance, he argues. The link is not necessarily "important," Males contends, and may not exist for even a "significant minority" of found instances of violence.

Males also suggests that aggressive attitudes do not necessarily lead to aggressive behavior, and that many recent media violence studies work with dubious laboratory based scenarios that do not easily translate into real world situations.

How do define TV violence

Obviously any congressional action against TV violence would have to define when such portrayed violence reached unacceptable levels. "While developing a definition would be challenging," the FCC report states, "we believe that Congress could do so."

Drawing from publicly filed comments, the FCC survey cites a variety of recommendations on this complex question:

• Pappas Telecasting suggests defining violence as “any overt depiction of a credible threat of physical force or the actual use of such force intended to physically harm an animate being or group of beings.”
• Morality in Media recommends upgrading current indecency rules to include televised episodes of violence, including prohibitions against "outrageously offensive or outrageously disgusting violence" or "severed or mutilated human bodies or body parts, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium.”
• "Ratings and blocking regulations might require multiple definitions for different kinds of violent programming to which parents might want to restrict their children’s access," the FCC suggests.

But the Report also concedes that any definition of violence will face daunting constitutional and logical hurdles. Federal judges have noted, the survey observes, that literary classics such as The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, and some classic fairy tales probably might not survive regulatory definitions of broadcast violence.

Indeed, a footnote to the Report acknowledges that past attempts to create "sufficiently clear" definitions of violent programming have repeatedly failed to survive court scrutiny. Efforts to define "excess violence" as "the depiction of acts of violence in such a graphic and/or bloody manner as to exceed common limits of custom and candor" have been held “void for vagueness” by courts.

And so when the FCC's TV violence report concludes that "that developing an appropriate definition of excessively violent programming would be possible, but such language needs to be narrowly tailored and in conformance with judicial precedent," it is not entirely clear what precedent the Commission is talking about.

Conclusion?

" . . . although there are constitutional barriers to directly limiting or time channeling the distribution of violent television programming," the FCC's Report on Violent Programming concludes, "the Supreme Court’s Pacifica decision and other decisions relating to restrictions on the broadcast of indecent content provide possible parallels for regulating violent television content."

But, as the Report repeatedly implies, defining "excess" violence is a lot more complicated than simply saying that you can't broadcast the words "fuck" or "shit" before 10 pm at night.

It is not surprising, then, that FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, a parent who regularly denounces TV violence and indecency, expressed disappointment with the agency's work on this matter.

"Like a financial consultant who advises a client that he could win the lottery, this Report discusses an optimal conclusion, but does not provide a complete analysis or a sound plan," Adelstein declared in his half-hearted endorsement of the document.

Indeed, it is difficult to see how the FCC's latest wisdom on this matter can guide Congress towards effective Federal cures for the problem, assuming that such remedies are even desirable.