Debra Goldman's Consumer Republic

It was bad luck for the entertainment industry and good luck for politicians that the FTC released its study on the marketing of violent content to youngsters at the height of the election season. The one place you don't want to be in an election year is on the wrong side of the welfare of children, a cause so unassailable that it brought together veep candidate Joe Lieberman and his opponent's wife, Lynn Cheney, in a show ofbipartisan moral outrage. One can hardly blame Motion Picture Association president Jack Valenti, grizzled veteran of the cultural decency wars, for declining to appear at the Senate hearings and submit to his ritual spanking.The FTC investigation into the marketing of media violence to children, the Clinton administration's grand gesture following the Columbine shootings, does more than establish that violent entertainment unsuitable for children under 17 is routinely marketed to them. It also suggests that such violence is bad for them. The impact of media violence on attitude and behavior has been studied for 40 years—and some would say the jury is still out.The FTC, having reviewed the evidence, now asserts otherwise, concluding that the link between exposure to media violence and increased aggression has been proven. The commission's language is far more tentative than one might guess from Lieberman's podium-pounding claim that media violence has "turned some [young people] into killers."Still, it is a conclusion on which to base policy recommendations. The FTC's mission was to find a politically useful "cause" of an inexplicable tragedy—and it found one. While the entertainment business is surely a scapegoat, it still has to deal with the reality that its ratings system has been exposed as a sham. Valenti did his best to diffuse the FTC report by characterizing any evaluation of a marketing plan as "subjective." But it does not require a deductive leap to interpret a marketing memo for an R-rated violent movie that states, "Our goal was to find the elusive teen-target audience and make sure everyone between the ages of 12-18 was exposed to the film."Besides, if Valenti thinks the movie rating system is working, he is spending too much time at private screenings. Anyone who bothers to look around the movie theater knows that teens and kids are fixtures in the audience for R-rated violence. The rating labels on entertainment products do not pass the truth-in-advertising test.This blow to the credibility of "voluntary" rating systems, whether for movies, music or video games, is no trifle. Ratings are to the entertainment industry what the health warning on the cigarette pack once was to the tobacco industry—an indemnity against charges of willful irresponsibility. Tobacco went down when the public became convinced that young people were being lured to a harmful product. The health warning was a sham; Joe Camel was the reality. Hollywood can't afford to make the same mistake. On the other hand, can it help it? It would behoove Hollywood to try, but it's not easy to cordon off young people from adult entertainment. First, there is the porousness of our all-connected-all-the-time culture. Second, there's less distinction today between the tastes of young people and their elders. The 35-year-old watches Frasier alongside the 14-year-old. Parents and kids go to rock concerts together. Teen girls and their moms covet clothes by the same designers, while scooters are sold by Toys R Us and Sharper Image. We live in a marketplace of kids of all ages.There is no spectacle so disingenuous as a company declaring it does not market to young people. The claim isn't quite as laughable as tobacco execs swearing they didn't know cigarettes were addictive, but it's close. A bias toward youth is built into marketing and has been at least since the 1920s. Today, thanks to a number of factors—demographics, youth buying power, new technologies and forever-young boomer adults—the frenzy to reach the young has never been so fevered. More marketing is aimed at people of ever younger ages. Yet at the same time, marketing to the young is the Achilles heel of the ruling ad-entertainment complex. It is the issue at which a public otherwise inured to our marketing- soaked culture draws the line. The politics of the welfare of children is on a collision course with marketing's deepening fixation on the youth target. It may be impossible to protect children from an invasive culture, but you can be sure political forces will try.

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Debra Goldman's Consumer Republic

Debra Goldman

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Debra Goldman