Rating the ratings

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

So what is the American media telling the American public about the agreement - worked out with Congress - of four major broadcast networks to voluntarily provide warnings prior to violent television shows beginning in the fall?

"The networks' new parental advisories are almost pathetically beside the point," writes Kurt Andersen in "Time."

"All they're doing is applying a Band-Aid. It's just a sham," says Dr. Carole Lieberman, a psychiatrist who heads the National Coalition on Television Violence, in "Newsweek."

"What they've {Congress} done is prove once again that the hypocrisy billowing out of Washington is as thick and noxious as the heat wave currently smothering the East Coast," writes Bob Herbert in the New York Times.

The heat must be smothering if this victory, as small as it is, is what the hard-hitting pundits have chosen to assail this week. These are tough news days, you have to understand. Slim pickins' for substantive things. And the people who get paid big bucks for molding the American mind, have to find something to gripe about. That's their job.

So, what do they do? The easy thing. Television's a popular subject; Congress a familiar hit. There's no heavy lifting or hard research here. Throw a few stones, file the copy and head for the beach.

The result, of course, is that Americans who read and listen to TV are now thinking, big deal - advisory warnings. What good are they? They won't stop the violence. Nothing can stop it.

And so our cynicism and apathy grow.

The fact is that network warnings are not going to stop crime. We have a mammoth problem in this country and there's not any one solution that is going to make it go away. Warning labels are hardly a miracle fix.

But no one ever said they were. They are, however, at least a start. Not a home run, slammed out of the park for all to cheer. Not gun control. Or life-imprisonment for murders like William Douglas who should be rotting in jail, not married and free and out drumming up book contracts. Not treatment and rehabilitation for non-violent drug addicts who are overcrowding our jails.

Yet they are a solid single.

And if you want to win a ballgame, the trick is to keep hitting singles. Little by little, that's how ball games are won.

And that's how problems are solved, too. Little by little. No step in the right direction is ever too small.

In America today there is a homicide every 20 minutes, a rape every six minutes, a child murdered every four hours. Network warnings are not going to suddenly change these facts.

But network warnings will have positive effects in the long run, if parents keep their kids away from the tube when violent shows are telecast. The long run. That's what this is about.

Just imagine for a minute, what America's essayists and editorial writers would have said had the networks refused to broadcast the advisories; if they had told Congress to take a hike.

The same pundits who now insist that warnings are meaningless would no doubt be fuming that the warnings are imperative! The networks would be accused of not listening to the public; Congress would be castigated for letting the networks off the hook.

But Congress is being castigated anyway, because, as the saying goes, you can't win for losing. Especially in the summer when the news is as stagnant as the heat.