Let the FCC tell you what's go or no-go on TV
By Jeff Gelles
Knight Ridder News Service
Want to know how many minutes of commercials are allowed during your children's favorite TV programs?
How about the standards for indecency on television and radio — believe it or not, there still are standards for radio — and what hours of the day are no-holds-barred?
Want to learn how to avoid getting burned by your kids' dialing pay-per-call (900) phone numbers?
You can get answers to all those questions, and a raft of others, at a brand-new Web site introduced this week by the Federal Communications Commission: www.fcc.gov/parents.
I'm not normally in the business of touting Internet sites, but this one strikes me as remarkably valuable, perhaps because I have children of the teen and `tween variety.
It has sections on children's TV rules, the confusing ratings system for kids' programming, and the new "Amber Alert" system for missing children.
It even has a search engine for finding quarterly lists of shows that broadcasters count as "core programming" for children — complete with the dutiful explanation that it's up to the broadcast station, not the FCC, to decide what counts as educational TV.
There are too many layers of detail for me to share anything beyond a smattering. But here are a few of the things I learned yesterday during a brief visit to the site:
Time limits on commercials apply during programs aimed primarily at children who are 12 and younger. The weekday limit is 12 minutes per hour. So you're not imagining it: Even on kids' shows, one minute in five can be a commercial.
Program-length commercials aimed at kids aren't allowed, and the rule doesn't just prohibit kids' infomercials — which has to be one of the scariers concepts that's ever entered my brain. It also bars, for example, a cartoon broadcast that included a commercial for dolls based on its characters.
Since January 2000, all new television sets with screens 13 inches or larger have included so-called V-chip technology. With the V-chip, also available as an add-on device, you can block shows based on children's television ratings, which are considerably more nuanced than movie ratings.
If you're wondering about indecency, here's what the FCC says: Indecent material is prohibited between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., "when there is the greatest likelihood that children may be watching."
A tougher question is exactly what that standard means — beyond that you can expect a fair amount of rude and lewd humor on "Saturday Night Live" and other late-night shows.
The new FCC Web site rises to the occasion: It includes a useful primer on the legal status of indecency, which is protected by the First Amendment but can be restricted to protect children, and obscenity, which cannot be broadcast.
What it doesn't explain — though there's evidence of it elsewhere on the FCC site — is how difficult the agency has found it to enforce those standards, especially in an era of almost-anything-goes talk radio.
