MAKING TELEVISION SAFE FOR KIDS

In 1961, shortly after President John F. Kennedy appointed me chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, I told the nation's broadcasters, the people who in those days ran the television business, that they had made television into a "vast wasteland."

Almost overnight those two words became television's first enduring sound bite. For decades, they have been used, over and over and over again, to describe what Americans find when they come home after work in the evenings and turn on their television sets, what our children find there after school or on Saturday morning. "Vast wasteland" appears in newspaper headlines, in book titles, in magazine articles, in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, even as the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question.

The two words I wanted people to remember from that speech, however, were not "vast wasteland." The two words I cared about were "public interest."

The law governing radio and television broadcasting, the Federal Communications Act of 1934, gives broadcasters free and exclusive use of broadcast channels on condition that they serve the "public interest, convenience and necessity." Because the act did not define what the public interest meant, Congress, the courts and the fcc have spent 60 frustrating years struggling to figure it out. To me the answer is clear. The public interest meant and still means what we should constantly ask: What can television do for our country, for the common good, for the American people? Most important, I believe, the public interest requires us to ask what we can do for our children. By the time most Americans are 18 years old, they have spent more time in front of a television set than they have spent in school, and far more than they have spent talking with their teachers, their friends or even their parents. Why haven't we acted to give our children a healthier television environment?

For half a century, anyone who has questioned the American commercial-television system has been shouted down as a censor. Instead of talking seriously about how to improve television for our children, Americans argue to a stalemate about broadcasters' rights and government censorship. We neglect discussion of moral responsibility by converting the public interest into an economic abstraction, and we use the First Amendment to stop debate rather than to enhance it, thus reducing our first freedom to the logical equivalent of a suicide pact.

Apart from public television, our television system is a business attuned exclusively to the marketplace. Children are treated as a market to be sold to advertisers at so many dollars per thousand eyeballs. In such a system, children are not seen as the future of democracy, nor does the television industry consider that it has a special responsibility for their education, values and nurturing. The Children's Television Act of 1990 marked the first time Congress recognized children as a special audience, and it requires commercial broadcasters to provide "educational and informational" programs for them.