Opponents of the V-Chip

Groups and citizens who oppose the legislation of the Violence Chip certainly have a lot to say!!

The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) has been the most vocal in this fight. They believe:

• The chip goes against the First Ammendment
• The legislation is actually double talk for giving the Government control to regulate television
• There are other ways to block out programs without the threat of Governmental intervention

In this paper they explin that The Telecommunications act orders the television industry to "voluntarily" create within one year a rating system for violence and "other objectionable content". If the industry does not, the President can appoint a federal ratings agency.

PROBLEM:
As explained in the same paper "A media ratings system mandated by the government under the threat of the formation of a federal rating agency should private industry fail is not a 'voluntary' system. It is a form of censorship clearly forbidden by the First Amendment"

On the subject of the First Ammendment: the ACLU also feels that since the government is taking control of the rating system, and will decide what ids violent and what is not, it is breaking the ammendment because depictions of violence are protected by it.

NBC Senior Vice President Richard Cotton was quoted as saying "How voluntary is this? Are we going to have someone in the government saying that 'ER" is too violent because there's blood in it?"

Limitations of the V-Chip

• Televisions without the V-Chip (and there are a lot of them) will not benefit at all from this tremendous undertaking
• It would be entirely too difficult to establish a rating system within one year because of the large number of programs, as well as the variety of them

There are many different products on the market right now that offer the same options of blocking out certain programing withoutgovernment intervntion.

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