Editorials

FCC Jumps the Gun on Violence and Children
by Eric Nuzum

Published May 2 - 8, 2001

Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released its second report on the marketing of violent entertainment to children, reserving its strongest language for the music industry. According to the FTC, teenagers have no trouble buying CDs with "Parental Advisory" labels, and advertisements for these releases are regularly featured in media that cater to young people. In the report, the FTC recommends that the music industry enforce its policies about underage purchase of stickered CDs and cease advertising in media with a "substantial" youth audience. According to the FTC, the industry’s attitudes towards both are woefully inadequate and meaningless.

Reading through the commission’s 70-page tome (see it for yourself at www.FTC.gov), you might wonder if the agency read its own data findings before writing the report. Even with the slightest scrutiny, some of the FTC’s arguments simply don’t hold water.

The report’s summary claims "Most teens and pre-teens make music purchase decisions without consulting their parents." Forty pages after making this statement, the report’s own data show that an adult is "involved" in 77 percent of underage music purchases.

The report further claims "recording companies routinely print advertising to promote their explicit-content labeled recordings to children under 17." In the appendix to the report, the list of publications that the FTC feels have "majority or substantial audience under age 17" includes The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Vibe, Spin, The Washington Post, and our beloved Plain Dealer. While almost one-third of the listed publications had a median age of 17 or less (including Seventeen, WWF Magazine and YM), some listed rags have an underage audience in the single digits. The same is true for the TV programs highlighted in the FTC report. The only program listed that had a majority of its viewers under 17 was MTV’s Total Request Live (at 58 percent). The 14 other programs on the FTC target list ranged from 38 percent underage viewers to 16 percent. In other words, were the FTC to get its way, the music industry would lose access to the 20 percent of the Friends audience under the age of 17, but also to the 80 percent of its viewers who are adults.

And most confusing of all, even thought the FTC was commissioned to research "violent" media, the agency seems to have expanded the list considerably. Would you consider the music of OutKast and Blink-182 to be excessively violent? The FTC does. Interestingly, of the 35 "objectionable" musical acts the FTC chose to monitor, only five include white musicians, and only three of those five acts are comprised entirely of whites.

The idea of conducting this investigation began shortly after the Columbine shootings in 1999. Hot on the heels of the public success of a similar FTC study into tobacco marketing, President Clinton felt it was an appropriate response to the public’s outcry for answers in the wake of the tragedy. However, unlike tobacco, there are a few pieces of information missing in the decision to investigate the music industry. It is fairly conclusive that smoking cigarettes will harm your health. But there’s simply no proof that music causes sane individuals – youth or adult – to become violent, suicidal, or sexually promiscuous because of exposure to music or music advertising. After more than four decades of academic research on the subject, no one has been able to prove that music makes good people do bad things. Someone prone to violence or extreme behavior would commit those same acts whether or not an Xzibit CD was playing at the time.

So where is this going? Probably nowhere for now. Despite the level of rhetoric this week, many of these politicians are probably just showing they can still be tough despite the almost $60 million in campaign donations the entertainment industry shelled out for the November elections ($24 million to the Gore/Lieberman ticket alone). But this is arguably just the setup; the FTC is scheduled to deliver another progress report on the music industry in six months. Politicians on Capitol Hill are already threatening legislative action if the music industry doesn’t get its act together by fall. As in the past, those attempting to control or suppress music are banking on the notion that they can get some good press on this issue and get away clean because the public is too ignorant, apathetic or disorganized to put up a fight.

We’ll see.