A "Pay or Play" Experiment to Improve Children's Educational Television
2010; Volume: 62; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2376-4457
Autores Tópico(s)Copyright and Intellectual Property
ResumoI. INTRODUCTION II. THE HISTORY OF THE FCC's CHILDREN'S EDUCATIONAL TELEVISION PROGRAMMING RULES III. THE CONSTITUTIONALITY OF THE FCC's CHILDREN'S EDUCATIONAL TELEVISION PROGRAMMING RULES IV. THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THE FCC'S APPROACH A. Regulatory Goals in Tension B. National Education Policy? C. Considerations of Regulatory Scarcity D. The Empirical Evidence So Far--Mixed Outcomes E. Explaining the Study Results 1. Broadcaster Incentives and Market Developments. 2. FCC Enforcement Limitations 3. Audience Factors V. PAY AN E/I FEE OR PLAY--AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL FOR PROMOTING QUALITY CHILDREN'S EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS ON TELEVISION A. Five Evaluative Objectives B. The Pay Prong: E/I Fees To Fund Public Television's Children's Eli Programming C. The Play Prong: Bounded Discretion VI. CONCLUSION I. INTRODUCTION The issue of child welfare is again at center stage in electronic media policy discussions both in Congress and at the FCC. The Children's Television Act of 1990 (CTA) is currently the operative legislation, designed to increase educational programming and reduce commercialization in children's television. (1) Last summer, the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing, Rethinking the Children's Television Act for a Digital Media Age, (2) to assess [h]ow well the [Children's Television Act] has worked, and how it can be updated to reflect the new digital media (3) Presumably in response to congressional interest, the FCC has opened an ambitious and broad-ranging inquiry into children and the electronic media. (4) This proceeding--capaciously titled In the Matter of Empowering Parents and Protecting Children in an Evolving Media Landscape--is ongoing and focuses, inter alia, on the adequacy of the educational content being offered for children across electronic media platforms. (5) The FCC has been attempting to encourage broadcasters to air quality children's educational television for almost fifty years. The modern story began in 1996, when the FCC, concluding that broadcasters had not taken the CTA seriously, adopted a processing guideline under which a broadcast station airing a minimum of hours per week of core children's educational or informational (E/I) programming as part of its public interest obligations would receive expedited, staff-level license renewal review. (6) The FCC also defined core children's E/I programming, for the first time, as regularly scheduled weekly programming of at least thirty minutes in length, aired between 7:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m., and specifically designed to serve the educational and informational needs of children sixteen years of age and younger. (7) A decade later, in recognition of the fact that digital transmission would allow each broadcaster to multicast several programming streams, the FCC extended what had come to be known as the three hour rule to digital broadcasters--so that stations would air an additional, proportional amount of E/I programming on any free digital content streams they chose to transmit. (8) Throughout, the agency also limited the amount of commercial content that could be aired during children's programming. Despite the passing of more than a decade since the adoption of the original children's television regime, neither the effectiveness of the rules nor their constitutionality has been established. The empirical record, as it stands, is thin. (9) The show Winx Club has been claimed to be core educational programming. Legal scholars have not recently attempted to analyze the effectiveness of the FCC's approach in today's radically changed media market. (10) And because all the E/I television rules were adopted through FCC negotiation with broadcasters and children's advocates, (11) the rules were never subjected to judicial review. This Article takes the opportunity recently offered by Congress and the FCC to assess the current regime and recommend policy changes. …
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