WRESTLING FOR OUR CHILDREN'S FUTURE

Remarks of FCC Commissioner Gloria Tristani

## Before the Congress on Television Violence of Puerto Rico

# October 12, 1999

It's wonderful to be with you again in the land of my birth. This was
one of the first groups I spoke to after becoming an FCC Commissioner.
During these past two years, I've made combatting media violence one of
my top priorities. It's working with groups like this that make this
fight worthwhile. I understand that President Clinton recently sent a
letter to my good friend Senator Rodriguez, applauding the Congress for
the work it has done. I'd like to add my heartfelt congratulations for
your tremendous efforts over the past five years and your dedication to
the cause.

I'd like to talk to you this morning about the problem of children and
violence in the United States. The statistics are chilling. According to
the Department of Justice, 19% of all arrests in 1997 were juveniles,
including 14% of all murder arrests and 17% of all violent crime
arrests. Just as alarming, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention
reports that 5.9% of high school students carried a gun in the 30 days
prior to the survey, and 8.5% of them carry some sort of weapon to
school.

We hear statistics like that and ask: why? What has happened to our
children? What has happened to the innocence of youth? Sometimes, like
after the tragedy at Columbine High School, we try to come to grips with
this crisis. That's when the finger-pointing starts. Guns are to blame.
Parents are to blame. Video games. TV and movies. Rap music. Inadequate
school security. Teenage angst. The list goes on and on.

There's probably some truth in all of these. Social problems like youth
violence rarely have simple causes. Whenever the problem boils over, as
it did in Columbine, it's probably some lethal cocktail of many things
all going wrong at once.

I'd like to talk with you today about one contributing factor to the
youth violence that's afflicting our nation \-- violence on television.
Again, I'm not saying that violence on TV is the main problem, or that
we should ignore other root causes. But while TV violence is not the
whole problem, I do believe it is *part* of the problem. The more risk
factors we can reduce for our children, the fewer situations that will
boil over into violence.

Violence on TV has become so prevalent, we've all become a bit numb.
Children are exposed to 8,000 murders and 100,000 acts of violence on TV
by the time they complete elementary school. A recent survey found that
prime time TV viewers see a violent scene every four minutes. And a
recent study by Children Now found that almost three-fourths of children
ages 10-17 describe males on TV as violent.

But as troubling as those statistics are, they don't tell the whole
story. *Every day* as many children are killed by guns in the U.S. as
died at Columbine. But where are the headlines? Where are the magazine
covers? Where are the talk shows sympathizing with the grieving loved
ones of these victims? The problem with statistics is that they are
bloodless. They're just numbers. It's too easy to forget the humanity
behind them. I never thought I'd be quoting Stalin, but he understood
this aspect of human psychology when he said "A single death is a
tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."

So let me turn to a particular example of media violence and try and
make this problem a little more concrete. I'd like to talk about
wrestling, which has become nothing short of a phenomenon in the U.S.
Just about every week, half of the top ten cable shows are wrestling. In
fact, last May a wrestling show had the largest audience of any
regularly scheduled entertainment show in cable history, with more than
6.1 million homes tuned in.

And now wrestling has invaded broadcast TV. The UPN Network, which may
not be carried in Puerto Rico, now has a show called "WWF Smackdown!" on
Monday nights at 8 p.m. UPN ran this ad in a recent trade publication
proclaiming that wrestling has made them the #2 network on a Monday
night in September among men 18-34 years of age, beating ABC, CBS and
Fox. And it has increased their ratings among teens by 450%.

If you haven't seen wrestling lately, you're in for a surprise. It's
gotten more and more outrageous. Men beating each other with metal
chairs, trash cans and shovels. Wrestlers thrown out of the ring onto
tables. Heads slammed on the ring steps. Lots of blood. Of course, it's
all staged and no one really gets hurt.

So what's the problem? For adults, maybe there isn't one. Most adults
probably recognize that it's all a big show, and that these wrestlers
have undergone lots of training to make the violence look more real than
it is. But children are a different story. Children under 17 make up at
least a third of the audience for TV wrestling, including over a million
kids under the age of 12. Indeed, as I stated before, the UPN ad boasts
that wrestling has improved the network's numbers among teens by 450%.

Here's the problem with children watching those shows, according to one
expert from the American Academy of Pediatrics:

"Pre-school-age and even early school-age kids don't differentiate well
between what is acted and what is reality. Even older kids, if they see
these behaviors, even if they know they are fake, if . . . they don't
see any consequences to it, and there's no pain or injury or any effect
or even a reaction, will imitate it and think it's fun and far less
dangerous than it really is."

So children see wrestlers hitting each other with chairs only to return
the next week good-as-new. There is violence, but no one gets hurt.
There appears to be dangerous behavior, but there are no consequences.
And it's not enough that the good guys usually win. The research shows
that heroes and good guys who act violently actually pose *more* of a
risk than villains because viewers are more likely to emulate and learn
from characters who are perceived as attractive.

These dangers were tragically demonstrated by an event in Dallas, Texas
this past May. A 7-year-old boy killed his 3-year-old brother by copying
a wrestling move he saw on TV. According to the police, the older boy
slammed his little brother to the floor with a running straight-armed
punch to the neck, a move called a "clothesline" in the wrestling world.
Asked to show what he had done, the boy ran at a life-size doll from
about ten feet away. As he got close to the doll, he stuck out his arm
at shoulder-height and struck the doll in the neck, knocking it
backwards. The 3-year-old boy died from brain swelling caused by his
head striking the family's concrete carpeted floor. The 7-year-old was
devastated, crying to the police that he didn't mean to hurt his
brother.

In our mass marketing culture, the violent messages are not confined to
TV. They've even invaded our children's play. Toy companies now make
"action figures" (which is what they call "dolls" for boys) based on all
the TV wrestling stars. The Steve "Stone Cold" Austin action figure
comes with his own metal folding chair for hitting opponents over the
head. The Rock comes with a trash can and lid to use as weapons. And the
Undertaker comes with his own shovel to swing at opponents and send them
"to an early grave."

One has to wonder what these toy companies are thinking. It's not like
the metal chair permits the child to use his or her imagination. Its
sole purpose is to permit a child to imitate TV wrestlers by hitting
another action figure over the head. As one educator put it, "If kids
are saturated with media violence and they're given toys that are linked
to that violence, then that's going to dictate their play."

As bad as that is, there's an even worse toy out there \-- a line of
talking wrestling action figures that are soft and almost two feet tall.
Bend the doll's arm and he yells, in the wrestler's real voice, "Let go
of my left \[or right\] arm!" Bend it harder and he yells "Oh my aching
arm!" Pile-drive his head into the ground and he taunts "Aagh! Is that
all you got?" The manufacturer markets this toy to children 4 years of
age and up.

In some ways, there's nothing new here. Kids have always played violent
games, like cowboys and Indians. But I think the intensity and level of
violence have increased to a new and dangerous level. A fake duel at
twenty paces with cap guns is far different than a clothesline to the
throat. Just look at how far we've come in the past ten years alone.
We've gone from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the late 1980's, to
the Power Rangers in the mid-1990's, and now to TV wrestling. As one
teacher said about Power Rangers, "The show says it is teaching about
good and evil, but all the children seem to remember is the fight." The
same seems to be true about wrestling.

Besides the overt violence, there's another aspect of the progression
(or, more accurately, *re*gression) from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to
wrestling. Wrestling is meaner, coarser, cruder and nastier than the
Turtles ever were. All of this spills over to our children as much as
the outright violence. In Canada, educators complained that grade school
kids were imitating TV wrestlers by grabbing their crotches and yelling
"Suck it" -- sometimes at their teachers. As one professor from the
University of Virginia put it "Every time I think wrestling has reached
rock bottom . . . \[it\] finds its way to a new moral depth." The
professor then described how a recent plot line culminated in the
champion holding a gun to the league owner's head in the center of the
ring, as the well-dressed owner appeared to wet himself in terror.

All of this is to say that we should pay as much attention to what goes
into our children's minds as what goes into their stomachs. When we
glamorize wrestlers on lunch boxes and T-shirts, when we give our
children toys that teach them to inflict pain, what messages are we
sending? In this kind of environment, should we really be surprised when
tragedies occur like the boy killing his brother in Dallas?

The easy thing to do is to blame the parents. We as a society can then
wash our hands of the problem and not feel guilty about it. Parents
shouldn't let their kids watch wrestling. Parents should supervise their
kids' play better. Parents should teach their kids right from wrong; if
they did, kids would know better than to let TV wrestling influence
them.

I do think parents have the primary responsibility for teaching their
children values and for keeping them out of trouble. But laying this all
at the feet of parents, I believe, is unfair. Look at what parents are
up against today. This is not the 1950's, when parents only had a few TV
channels to worry about and Elvis Presley's shaking hips were considered
scandalous. Now we have hundreds of TV channels. Video arcades. The
Internet. VCRs. Portable stereos. Each trying to outdo each other to
capture our kids' attention by being more lewd and outrageous than the
next. Our information society has so many ways of getting into our
children's heads that it's not realistic to expect parents to monitor
them all.

As one expert argued:

> Parents need help, not lectures about what they're doing wrong. . . .
> It takes a great deal of time, energy, and knowledge to make informed
> decisions about how to deal effectively with the endless barrage of
> entertainment violence in children's lives. Once the decisions are
> made it takes a great deal of skill putting them into practice with
> children in effective ways. Even when they try, parents report that no
> amount of effort can adequately protect their children from the
> violence that surrounds them. And what about those parents whose
> resources are already stretched to the limit providing for the basic
> needs of their families? Society should support parents in their
> efforts to do a good job, instead of placing hurdles in parents' way
> at every turn.

Put another way, we do everything to undermine parents' ability to keep
their children out of trouble and then blame them when they fail.
Instead of blaming parents, I think it's time we gave them a helping
hand. Parents shouldn't have to constantly battle the larger culture in
raising their kids. The culture should support parents, not undermine
them.

That's why I'm so honored that the Chairman of the FCC asked me to lead
the Commission's V-Chip Task Force. The V-Chip is a modern tool that
will help parents do their job in the modern world. Right now, half of
all sets sold in the U.S. with screens 13 inches and larger must have a
V-Chip. By next January, all TV sets will have a V-Chip. That will
permit parents in Puerto Rico and elsewhere to set their TV sets to
block programming that they don't want their children to see.

I should warn you, however, that the system is not yet fully
operational. For the V-Chip to work, the broadcast or cable network must
encode the ratings information in what's called the "Vertical Blanking
Interval" of the television signal. This is different than, and in
addition to, the ratings icon I'm sure you've all seen at the beginning
of many shows. While most networks are already encoding their programs
so that the V-Chip can work, some aren't. Here in Puerto Rico, you
should know that Telemundo is not yet encoding its ratings, nor is
Comedy Central, which runs the graphic show "South Park." These networks
should be operational sometime next year. Until then, you won't be able
to block programming on those networks using the V-Chip.

There are other things we can do to help parents. Those who produce
shows should show some restraint when children are likely to be in the
audience. Let me give you an example. Some of you may have heard about a
high-speed chase that occurred on a California highway last year. The
news coverage began at about 3 in the afternoon \-- when lots of young
children were watching television \-- and was carried *live* by stations
throughout the Los Angeles area. The stations cut into their regular
programming -- including cartoons -- to cover this story. You may recall
that the event ended tragically, with the man putting a shotgun to his
chin and killing himself on live TV. Given the time of day, and the lack
of any real newsworthy event that required live coverage, I think the
station could have and should have spared the children of L.A. the
vision of watching a man blow his brains out.

At a minimum, we should stop *targeting* our children with violence. How
can toy manufacturers target 4 and 5 year-old children with dolls that
aren\'t much smaller than their playmates, and that encourage them to
inflict bodily harm? And why do networks carry wrestling when lots of
children are in the audience, rather than in a later time slot? USA
Network and TNT carry wrestling at 7 p.m.; UPN runs wrestling at 8. From
UPN's ad, they're obviously proud of the number of teens who are
watching -- up 450%. One has to believe these networks also know how
many younger fans they have as well. After all, toy manufacturers
wouldn't make wrestling action figures for 4 and 5 year-olds if there
was no market for them.

Finally, I believe we need more counter-programming to the violence on
TV. And I'm not talking about town hall meetings or panel discussions
about the problems of violence. I'm talking about counter-programming
that reaches kids on the same emotional level that the shows glamorizing
violence do. That kind of gut-level counter-attack worked for
cigarettes, drunk driving and drugs. There's no reason it can't be used
just as effectively in the fight against violence.

Some networks have begun to address the challenge. MTV, for instance,
has begun a campaign entitled "Fight for Your Rights: Take a Stand
Against Violence." As part of that campaign, they have aired, and will
be airing, several programs, including:

-   "Scared Straight! 1999," an update of the award-winning documentary
    in which a group of troubled young people visit a prison to see the
    actual consequences of a life of violence.

-   "Unfiltered: Violence from the Eyes of Youth," which puts cameras in
    the hands of young people to document the violence in their lives.

I think it would be useful to run a public service announcement during
wrestling showing the real-life consequences when kids imitate their
favorite TV wrestlers. Showing kids in a cast or a neck brace would do a
lot more to offset the violent message of TV wrestling than a disclaimer
telling kids "don't try this at home."

It's time that we pay more attention to violence in the U.S., especially
when it comes to our children. We worry about their exposure to sex; we
even protect them from exposure to too many commercials. It's time we
add violence to that list. I know you will continue to do your part to
make that happen. To paraphrase Albert Camus -- perhaps we cannot
prevent this world from being a world in which children suffer. But we
can reduce the number of suffering children. And if you believers don't
help, who else in the world can help us do this?

Thank you again for inviting me.