These categories are broadly defined so that they may contain certain elements, but they don t tell you whether an individual program contains that element. So if you compare it to food labeling, it would be as if you were buying a product and said this product category might contain MSG, might contain fat, it might contain some other harmful product, but you have no way of knowing whether this particular product does contain some harmful element. And we re particularly concerned about television violence. There have been decades of research that show that TV violence has a harmful effect on children. This is a public health issue.
Parents have a right to know whether violence is in the programming.
Here, you are asking individual producers to make decisions that are really more appropriate for child development specialists about what age group should or should not see a program. Well, you re a producer, Mr. Hogan. And the Canadian system, which had a sliding scale for sex and violence was absolutely rejected by parents in Canada. It was an unmitigated disaster. Now, some of these polls that we ve heard about, like the PTA Poll, where they claim that 98 percent of the respondents responded that they wanted more content, what they failed to tell you is that they sent out thousands and thousands of questionnaires, and I believe they had 400 returned and 98 percent of those were from mothers, not fathers.