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Over Age And Content Ratings Essay

1412 Words6 Pages

The digital world that engulfs most of the society within the U.S. continues to become increasingly violent. Since the creation of television, new platforms have been developed to display media, such as the internet, social media, and video gaming. Now there are multiple ways people can stream line media and all sorts of information, however, since it is easier for people to get their hands on such content, it could be reaching the wrong crowd. Children are exposed to violent content from a young age and as a result become desensitized to the violence around them or have a skewed perception of reality. This is why the debate over age and content ratings is a controversial one, researchers believe these ratings are important to help parents …show more content…

However, in order to know what content can and can’t be displayed the television companies had to form a rating system similar to that of motion pictures. As a result, they created six age based categories (e.g. TV-PG, TV-14) and five content based subcategories (e.g. V “violence”, S “sexual situations”). Still there was concern over whether or not this system accurately reflects program content and if it addresses parental needs. The National Television Violence Study conducted in 1997 showed that for “8 out of 10 programs with sexual dialogue and 9 out 10 with adult language were not rated D or L.” Then NBC for shows rated TV-PG and TV-14 (sometimes containing the most sexual and violent content of any rated show) did not give any content descriptors at all. Therefore, researcher, Nancy Signorielli, set out to see if these rating systems constructed by the television company were actually working or helping to sort content and alert viewers/parents. She conducted a study that had sample consisting of 9 weeks of prime-time network programming between the fall of 1997 and fall of 2003, equalling 838 programs. Then used

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