In the debate over who has the responsibility to protect children from harmful media, is it simply up to parents? Should media companies be playing a role? Is it time to rely on some government regulation?
These were the competing paradigms on display at "Beyond Primetime," a meeting of media minds at the Time Warner Center in New York City on February 6-7. The conference, which was billed as the first of what would become a yearly event, was sponsored by the Aspen Institute and run by James P. Steyer, author of The Other Parent: The Inside Story of Media's Effect on Our Children (Atria Books, 2002). Steyer clearly has high-profile connections to entertainment moguls in LA and NYC; a line of shiny black cars idled just outside the glass entrance doors, awaiting the executives inside. Participants included Time-Warner CEO Richard Parsons, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, CBS's CEO Leslie Moonves, Warner Music's CEO Edgar Bronfman, and Geraldine Laybourne of Oxygen Media who once ran Nickelodeon, to name a few.
Ken Auletta, the New Yorker media writer, asked the CEOs: "What do you produce that you wouldn't let your own children watch?"
Roberts said his family made use of parental controls in their media system, banning anything rated for mature audiences. "The answer is, a lot," he said.
Bronfman said he didn't let his children --- he has 4, all under the age of 11 -- listen to anything "stickered," which I'm guessing meant anything with a "mature" or "explicit lyrics" sticker attached to it. He later took umbrage with Auletta's line of questioning. "We're not in the kids' music business," Bronfman said. "We're a music company focusing on content for age 10 and up. The implication is that we should be doing something for young children. There is corporate responsibility, but the danger is in assuming that it's not the parents' responsibility."
I kept wondering about the parameters of the debate in general. Exactly what kinds of media are most harmful in the first place? For children at what ages? Under what contexts? What are the differences between commercials and programming? Fragments of these questions bounced around the room a few times, but they never really stuck.
(Written on February 8, 2007.)
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