Disappearing family hour

Chicago Tribune: In 1975, national broadcasters tried to ward off possible government intervention by agreeing to reserve the early evening as the “family hour” for television. The time would be largely free of sex and violence.

The Parents Television Council, a conservative watchdog group, reports that nowadays the family hour is “no place for children.”

The group studied 208 shows during the 2006-07 TV season and found almost 90 percent contained objectionable material — sexual content, violence, bad language. The council viewed family hour programs during three two-week periods on ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CW and My Network TV. The council concluded “corporate interests have hijacked the family hour” by pushing “more and more adult-oriented programming to the early hours of the evening.”

So is the answer to sanitize the family hour again?

The television screen is a much different place than it was in 1975. Traditional broadcasters compete with cable and satellite TV channels, plus a growing array of video games, podcasts and endless Internet attractions. The notion of a cherished hour of broadcast time sounds like a quaint relic of the days before DVRs allowed viewers to watch what they want when they want it, instead of in the time slots dictated by TV broadcasters.

V-chip technology

The better answer today is to arm parents with the tools to create their own standards for television fare. In fact, they have the tool: V-chip technology. The V-chip, which has been required in TV sets sold since January 2000, lets parents program their TVs to accept or block shows according to a rating system for adult-oriented content.

The V-chip is there, but a Federal Communications Commission report released in April found only 15 percent of parents have used it.

Are they just techno-illiterate? Not necessarily. More than half of American families that had teenagers said they used filters for Internet content, according to a 2005 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

That suggests parents are less concerned about television (and with good reason).