Parents, not networks, should decide what kinds of programming their children watch, which is why ratings exist. But a rating system that withholds material facts about its content is no longer a reliable filter — it is a blindfold.
Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 based on this very premise. The law pressed the television industry to build a ratings system that families could use to judge what content is allowed into their homes using the TV Parental Guidelines, the codes in the corner of the screen. TV-Y and TV-Y7 sort children’s programming by age, and content descriptors flag the reasons behind a rating: V for violence, L for coarse language, S for sexual situations, and D for suggestive dialogue. The list has expanded since the 1990s. If you turn on a kids movie from the 1940s, you will now often find a warning label for “smoking.”
