Kids' Television Rules Face Challenge

Who can stand up against kids? Apparently Viacom, Walt Disney and General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal. These companies are opposing new FCC rules aimed at ensuring there's a minimum of educational television for children on broadcast television. The government has long set guidelines for broadcasters to set aside a certain amount of educational programming for children -- currently, three hours per week -- with commercials limited to 12 minutes per hour of kids' programming on weekdays and 10.5 minutes on weekends. But the FCC has formulated new rules to take into account the nation's move toward digital transmission of TV signals and the phaseout of analog broadcasting. Moving to digital transmission will allow stations to broadcast several channels where they could only show one before. The new FCC rules would extend the children's programming requirements to those new channels, something the major entertainment companies are resisting. They argue that the new channels could be useful for formats that are not conducive to kids' shows, such as weather or news channels. (Can we really not conceive of educational weather or news programming for children?) The rules also would limit the amount of time broadcasters can put commercial Web addresses on the screen, which the companies think would be a handicap in a digital world where people can hop from a TV show to a Web site with a single click. In addition, the rules would limit broadcasters' ability to pre-empt educational programming for things such as sporting events. (Obviously, from a business perspective, you can only schedule kids TV during football games.)
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Arshad Mohammed]
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