Simply watching an episode or two of their child's favorite show or reading the extensive fall previews in magazines and newspapers isn't too demanding. But mandating inappropriate, incomplete, and ill-advised infobytes serves only to confuse consumers. Like the ubiquitous cancer warnings on artificial sweeteners based on stuffing laboratory rats with ridiculous amounts of pure saccharine. Just because a committee composed primarily of entertainment industry representatives, whose employers are seeking the widest possible audience decrees one show or the other suitable for children, it does not follow that the program is something you would want your kids to see. The new ratings system is not designed by consumers as expressed by their behavior in a free market, but by an industry looking to fulfill the requirements of politicians and bureaucrats who don't so much want to clean up TV as to be able to say they've done something about it.
American families have a diversity of competing, even conflicting, values.
This wisdom also applies to the government-mandated, industry designed rating system. In an increasingly pluralistic and multicultural society, a uniform rating system does not work for 100 million different households, each of which have their own value judgments about what is appropriate for home viewing. As we rapidly enter the information age and televisions merge with our PCs, the existing technology that would allow many different rating and screening systems designed by groups from the conservative Family Research Council to Norman Lear's liberal People for the American Way is set to soon become commonplace. Rather, it was. It's rated for mature audiences.