[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 69 (Thursday, May 13, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5195-S5214]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




VIOLENT AND REPEAT JUVENILE OFFENDER ACCOUNTABILITY AND REHABILITATION 
                              ACT OF 1999

  The Senate continued with the consideration of the bill.


                           Amendment No. 328

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Senate resumes 
consideration of the Hollings amendment, No. 328, for the remaining 2 
hours of debate, which is to be equally divided in the usual form. Who 
yields time?
  The Senator from South Carolina.
  Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, I yield such time as I may consume.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is recognized.
  Mr. HOLLINGS. I thank the distinguished Chair.
  Mr. President, this amendment is nothing more than reinstituting the 
family hour or the family viewing period. We had it during the 
seventies, but we set it aside, just like the distinguished Senator 
from Nevada was talking about with respect to censoring and making sure 
these producers and broadcasters don't interfere with the creative 
impulses of a writer or a producer in Hollywood. But when it comes to 
the bottom line, they change that around. That is what we have, and it 
is very, very difficult to make an overwhelming case.
  We are again facing the same stonewalling that we viewed Sunday on 
``Meet the Press,'' when the representative of the Motion Picture 
Association, who has been doing this for 30-some years, said he did not 
know the effect of TV violence on children and asked for another study. 
We pointed out, of course, that is the way we started with Senator 
Pastore, back in 1969, 30 years ago, and that is when we had the 
Surgeon General's study. It has become worse and worse and worse over 
the years.
  Again this morning, in the Washington Post, an article says: ``Movie 
Mogul Defends Hollywood.'' Mr. Edgar Bronfman states:

       Violence ``is not an entertainment problem''. . . .

  Mr. President, all we have to do is go to the May 3 issue of 
Newsweek. I ask unanimous consent to print the article, ``Loitering on 
the Dark Side'' in the Record.

[[Page S5196]]

  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

Loitering on the Dark Side--The Columbine High Killers Fed On A Culture 
                 of Violence That Isn't About To Change

                            (By Steven Levy)

       Now for the recriminations. Was the Colorado tragedy a 
     legacy of our technoculture: Doom, ``Natural Born Killers,'' 
     hate-amplifying Web sites and pipe-bomb plans from the Net? 
     Or simply two teenage killers' ability to collect enough 
     ordnance to sustain a small army? Gathering the potential 
     culprits seems less an exercise in fixing liability than 
     tossing random darts at the violence-fixated cultural 
     landscape. After the massacre, there were calls to cancel two 
     upcoming Denver events: a Marilyn Manson concert and the 
     NRA's annual convention. Guilt has to be spread pretty widely 
     to make bedfellows of the androgynous Goth crooner and 
     Charlton Heston.
       Still, we've got to look for answers to prevent further 
     massacres, if not to clear up the mystery in Littleton. The 
     Internet has been getting heat not only as a host for some of 
     the sick enthusiasms of the Trenchcoat Mafia, but as a 
     potential source of explosive information. Defenders of the 
     New rightfully note that criticizing the reach of the 
     increasingly pervasive Web is like blaming paper for bad 
     poetry. Still, it's undeniable that cyberspace offers 
     unlimited opportunity to network with otherwise unreachable 
     creepy people. What's worse is how the Net makes it easy to 
     succumb to the temptation to post anything--even Ubermensch 
     song lyrics or murderous threats--without the sure sanctions 
     that would come if you tried that in your geographical 
     community. The Internet credo is empowerment, and 
     unfortunately that also applies to troubled teens sticking 
     their toes into the foul water of hatemongering. As parents 
     are learning, the Net's easy accessibility to the 
     netherworlds is a challenge that calls, at the least, for a 
     measure of vigilance.
       Hollywood is also a fat target. From Oliver Stone's lyric 
     depiction of random murder (rabidly viewed by the Columbine 
     killers) to stylish slaughter in ``The Matrix,'' violence is 
     the main cource on our entertainment menu. We are a nation 
     that comfortably embraces Tony Soprano, a basic-values type 
     of guy who not only orders hits but himself performs the 
     occasional whacking. The industry's defense is summarized by 
     Doug Richardson, who's scripted ``Die Hard II'' and ``Money 
     Train.'' ``If I were to accept the premise that the media 
     culture is responsible,'' he says, ``then I would be 
     surprised that the thousands of violent images we see don't 
     inspire more acts of violence.'' In other words, the sheer 
     volume of carnage is proof of its harmlessness.

  Mr. HOLLINGS. It says:

       Hollywood is also a fat target. Oliver Stone's lyric 
     depiction of random murder (rabidly viewed by the Columbine 
     killers) to stylish slaughter in ``The Matrix,'' violence is 
     the main course on our entertainment menu.

  I ask unanimous consent that a Time magazine article, again this 
month, entitled ``Bang, You're Dead,'' be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                           Bang, You're Dead


  revenge fantasies are proliferating in movies and on tv. but should 
                     they be blamed for littleton?

                          (By Richard Corliss)

       The young and the older always eye one another across a 
     gaping chasm. Gray heads shake in perplexity, even in a week 
     of mourning, even over the mildest expressions of teen taste. 
     Fashion, for example. Here are these nice kids from suburban 
     Denver, heroically documenting the tragedy for TV, and they 
     all seem to belong to the Church of Wearing Your Cap 
     Backward. A day later, as the teens grieve en masse, oldsters 
     ask, ``when we were kids, would we have worn sweats and jeans 
     to a memorial service for our friends?'' And of course the 
     trench-coat killers had their own distinctive clothing: 
     Johnny Cash by way of Quentin Tarantino. Should we blame the 
     Columbine massacre on haberdashery?
       No, but many Americans want to pin the blame for this and 
     other agonizing splatter fests on pop culture. Adults look at 
     the revenge fantasies their kids see in the `plexes, listen 
     (finally) to the more extreme music, glance over their kids' 
     shoulders at Druid websites and think, ``Seems repulsive to 
     me. Maybe pop culture pulled the trigger.''
       Who wouldn't want to blame self-proclaimed Antichrist 
     superstar Marilyn Mason? Listen to Lunchbox, and get the 
     creeps: ``The big bully try to stick his finger in my chest/ 
     Try to tell me, tell me he's the best/ But I don't really 
     give a good goddamn cause/ I got my lunchbox and I'm armed 
     real well / Next motherf***** gonna get my metal/ . . . Pow 
     pow pow.'' Not quite Stardust.
       Sift through teen movies of the past 10 years, and you 
     could create a hindsight game plan for Littleton. Peruse 
     Heathers (1989), in which a charming sociopath engineers the 
     death of jocks and princesses. Study carefully, as one of the 
     Columbine murderers reportedly did, Natural Born Killers 
     (1994), in which two crazy kids cut a carnage swath through 
     the Southwest as the media ferociously dog their trail. 
     Sample The Basketball Diaries (1995), in which druggy high 
     schooler Leonardo DiCaprio daydreams of strutting into his 
     homeroom in a long black coat and gunning down his hated 
     teacher and half the kids. The Rage: Carrie 2 (now in 
     theaters) has jocks viciously taunting outsiders until one 
     girl kills herself by jumping off the high school roof and 
     another wreaks righteous revenge by using her telekinetic 
     powers to pulverize a couple dozen kids.
       Grownups can act out revenge fantasies too. In Payback, Mel 
     Gibson dishes it out (pulls a ring out of a punk's nose, 
     shoots his rival's face off through a pillow) and takes it 
     (gets punched, switch-bladed, shot and, ick, toe-hammered). 
     The Matrix, the first 1999 film to hit $100 million at the 
     box office, has more kung fu than gun fu but still brandishes 
     an arsenal of firepower in its tale of outsiders against the 
     Internet droids.
       In Littleton's wake, the culture industry has gone 
     cautious. CBS pulled an episode of Promised Land because of a 
     plot about a shooting in front of a Denver school. The WB has 
     postponed a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode with a 
     schoolyard-massacre motif. Movie-studio honchos, who 
     furiously resist labeling some serious adult films FOR ADULTS 
     ONLY, went mum last week when asked to comment on any 
     connection between violent movies and violent teen behavior. 
     That leaves us to explain things.
       Revenge dramas are as old as Medea (she tore her sons to 
     pieces), as hallowed as Hamlet (seven murders), as familiar 
     as The Godfather. High drama is about the conflict between 
     shades of good and evil, often within the same person. But 
     it's easier to dream up a scenario of slavering evil and 
     imperishable good. This is the moral and commercial equation 
     of melodrama: the greater the outrage suffered, the greater 
     the justification for revenge. You grind me down at first; I 
     grind you up at last. This time it's personal.
       Fifty years ago, movies were homogenous, meant to appeal to 
     the whole family. Now pop culture has been Balkanized; it is 
     full of niches, with different groups watching and playing 
     their own things. And big movies, the ones that grab $20 
     million on their first weekend, are guy stuff. Young males 
     consume violent movies, in part, for the same reason they 
     groove to outlaw music: because their parents can't 
     understand it--or stand it. To kids, an R rating for violence 
     is like the Parental Advisory on CDs: a Good Housebreaking 
     Seal of Approval.
       The cultural gap, though, is not just between old and 
     young. It is between the haves and the self-perceived have-
     nots of teen America. Recent teen films, whether romance or 
     horror, are really about class warfare. In each movie, the 
     cafeteria is like a tiny former Yugoslavia, with each clique 
     its own faction: the Serbian jocks, Bosnian bikers, Kosovar 
     rebels, etc. And the horror movies are a microcosm of ethnic 
     cleansing.
       Movies may glamorize mayhem while serving as a fantasy 
     safety valve. A steady diet of megaviolence may coarsen the 
     young psyche--but some films may instruct it. Heathers and 
     Natural Born Killers are crystal-clear satires on 
     psychopathy, and The Basketball Diaries is a mordant portrait 
     of drug addiction. Payback is a grimly synoptic parody of all 
     gangster films. In three weeks, 15 million people have seen 
     The Matrix and not gone berserk. And Carrie 2 is a crappy 
     remake of a 1976 hit that led to no murders.

  Mr. HOLLINGS. Reading one sentence:

       Sift through teen movies of the past 10 years, and you 
     could create a hindsight game plan for Littleton.

  Another interesting article, ``Gunning for Hollywood,'' appeared in 
U.S. News & World Report on May 10. I ask unanimous consent that the 
column by John Leo be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                         Gunning for Hollywood

                             (By John Leo)

       Every time a disaster like the Colorado massacre occurs, 
     Democrats want to focus on guns and Republicans want to talk 
     about popular culture. Much of this comes from actual 
     conviction, but economic interest often disguises itself as 
     principle. The Republicans can't say much about the gun 
     lobby, because they accept too much of its money. The 
     Democrats can't talk about Hollywood and the rest of the 
     entertainment industry, because that's where so much of their 
     funding comes from.
       The gun and entertainment executives tend to patrol the 
     same familiar borders. Charlton Heston, head of the National 
     Rifle Association, offered some dubious arguments: An armed 
     guard at Columbine High School would have saved lives; 
     legalizing concealed weapons tends to lower crime rates. 
     Gerald Levin, the equally adamant head of Time Warner, said 
     he feared ``a new season of political opportunism and moral 
     arrogance intended to scapegoat the media.'' He raised the 
     specter of censorship, noting that Oliver Cromwell, ``the 
     spiritual forebear of Rev. Falwell,'' shut down the theaters 
     of 17th-century England on moral grounds.
       Surely we can do better than this. We can talk about the 
     importance of gun control,

[[Page S5197]]

     and we can talk about the impact on behavior of violence 
     portrayed in the media without suggesting that censorship is 
     any kind of solution.
       This time around, a center of sorts seems to be forming. 
     Bill Bennett and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, familiar social 
     conservative voices on this issue, have been joined by Sens. 
     John McCain and Sam Brownback and, it seems, by the Clintons 
     and the Gores. Tipper Gore said that the entertainment media 
     bear some responsibility for the killings in Colorado. In a 
     radio address, President Clinton urged parents to ``refuse to 
     buy products'' which glorify violence.''
       If more Republicans will talk about guns, maybe more 
     Democrats will ask their favorite media moguls to start 
     thinking harder about the social impact of the many awful 
     products they dump on the market.
       ``We want to appeal to their sense of responsibility and 
     citizenship and ask them to look beyond the bottom 
     line,''said Lieberman. There is talk of some sort of ``summit 
     meeting'' on violence. McCain plans a hearing this week on 
     how violence is marketed to children. For the long term, we 
     need a campaign appealing to pride and accountability among 
     media executives. Shame, too, says Lieberman.
       Pointless violence is an obvious topic. In the dreadful Mel 
     Gibson movie Payback, a nose ring is yanked off, bringing 
     some of the nose with it. A penis is pulled off in the new 
     alleged comedy Idle Hands. Worse are the apparent connections 
     between screen and real-world violence. Michael Carneal's 
     shooting rampage in a Kentucky school was similar to one in a 
     movie he saw, The Basketball Diaries. In the film, the main 
     character dreams of breaking down a classroom door and 
     shooting six classmates and a teacher while other students 
     cheer. In Manhattan in 1997, one of the men who stomped a 
     parade watcher to death on St. Patrick's Day finished with a 
     line almost exactly like the one uttered by a killer in the 
     movie A Bronx Tale: ``Look at me--I'm the one who did this to 
     you.''
       A damaging kind of movie violence is currently on display 
     in a very good new movie, The Matrix. Keanu Reeves's 
     slaughter of his enemies is filmed as a beautiful ballet. 
     Thousands of shells fall like snow from his helicopter and 
     bounce in romantic slo-mo off walls and across marble floors. 
     The whole scene makes gunning people down seem like a 
     wonderfully satisfying hobby, as if a brilliant ad agency had 
     just landed the violence account. What you glorify you tend 
     to get more of. Somebody at the studio should have asked, 
     ``Do we really need more romance attached to the act of 
     blowing people away?''
       Sadism for the masses. A generation or two ago, movie 
     violence was routinely depicted as a last resort. There were 
     exceptions, of course. But violence was typically something a 
     hero was forced to do, not something he enjoyed. He had no 
     choice. Now, as the critic Mark Crispin Miller once wrote, 
     screen violence ``is used primarily to invite the viewer to 
     enjoy the feel of killing, beating, mutilating.''
       We are inside the mind and emotions of the shooter, 
     experiencing the excitement. This is violence not as a last 
     resort but as deeply satisfying lifestyle. And those who use 
     films purely to exploit and promote the lifestyle ought to be 
     called on it.
       Some years ago, Cardinal Roger Mahony, Roman Catholic 
     archbishop of Los Angeles, was thought to be preparing a 
     speech calling for a tough new film-rating code. Hollywood 
     prepared itself to be appalled. But instead of calling for a 
     code, the cardinal issued a pastoral letter defending 
     artistic freedom and appealed to moviemakers to think more 
     about how to handle screen violence. When violence is 
     portrayed, he wrote, ``Do we feel the pain and dehumanization 
     it causes to the person on the receiving end, and to the 
     person who engages in it? . . . Does the film cater to the 
     aggressive and violent impulses that lie hidden in every 
     human heart? Is there danger its viewers will be desensitized 
     to the horror of violence by seeing it?''
       Good questions. Think about it, Hollywood.

  Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, Mr. Leo's column cites that TV violence 
has a definite effect on children.
  Turning to the New Republic of May 17, Gregg Easterbrook in the New 
Republic wrote another relevant article entitled, ``Watch and Learn.'' 
I ask unanimous consent that this article be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:


 Copyright 1999 The New Republic, Inc., The New Republic; May 17, 1999

       Section: Pg. 22.
       Length: 3724 words.
       Headline: Watch and Learn.
       Byline: Gregg Easterbrook.
       Highlight: Yes, the media do make us more violent.
       Body: Millions of teens have seen the 1996 move Scream, a 
     box-office and home-rental hit. Critics adored the film. The 
     Washington Post declared that it ``deftly mixes irony, self-
     reference, and social wry commentary.'' The Los Angeles Times 
     hailed it as ``a bravura, provocative send-up.'' Scream opens 
     with a scene in which a teenage girl is forced to watch her 
     jock boyfriend tortured and then disemboweled by two fellow 
     students who, it will eventually be learned, want revenge on 
     anyone from high school who crossed them. After jock boy's 
     stomach is shown cut open and he dies screaming, the killers 
     stab and torture the girl, then cut her throat and hang her 
     body from a tree so that Mom can discover it when she drives 
     up. A dozen students and teachers are graphically butchered 
     in the film, while the characters make running jokes about 
     murder. At one point, a boy tells a big-breasted friend she'd 
     better be careful because the stacked girls always get it in 
     horror films; in the next scene, she's grabbed, stabbed 
     through the breasts, and murdered. Some provocative send-up, 
     huh? The move builds to a finale in which one of the killers 
     announces that he and his accomplice started off by murdering 
     strangers but then realized it was a lot of more fun to kill 
     their friends.
       Now that two Colorado high schoolers have murdered twelve 
     classmates and a teacher--often, it appears, first taunting 
     their pleading victims, just like celebrity stars do in the 
     movies--some commentators have dismissed the role of violence 
     in the images shown to the young, pointing out that horrific 
     acts by children existed before celluloid or the phosphor 
     screen. That is true--the Leopold-Loeb murder of 1924, for 
     example. But mass murders by the young, once phenomenally 
     rare, are suddenly on the increase. Can it be coincidence 
     that this increase is happening at the same time that 
     Hollywood has begun to market the notion that mass murder is 
     fun?
       For, in cinema's never-ending quest to up the ante on 
     violence, murder as sport is the latest frontier. Slasher 
     flicks began this trend; most portray carnage from the 
     killer's point of view, showing the victim cowering, 
     begging, screaming as the blade goes in, treating each 
     death as a moment of festivity for the killer. (Many 
     killers seek feelings of power over their victims, 
     criminology finds; by revealing in the pleas of victims, 
     slasher movies promote this base emotion.) The 1994 movie 
     Natural Born Killers depicted slaying the helpless not 
     only as a way to have a grand time but also as a way to 
     become a celebrity; several dozen onscreen murders are 
     shown in that film, along with a discussion of how great 
     it makes you feel to just pick people out at random and 
     kill them. The 1994 movie Pulp Fiction presented hit men 
     as glamour figures having loads of interesting fun; the 
     actors were mainstream stars like John Travolta. The 1995 
     movie Seven, starring Brad Pitt, portrayed a sort of 
     contest to murder in unusually grotesque ways. 
     (Screenwriters now actually discuss, and critics comment 
     on, which film's killings are most amusing.) The 1995 
     movie The Basketball Diaries contains an extended dream 
     sequence in which the title character, played by teen 
     heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio, methodically guns down 
     whimpering, pleading classmates at his high school. A rock 
     soundtrack pulses, and the character smiles as he kills.
       The new hollywood tack of portraying random murder as a 
     form of recreation does not come from schlock-houses. 
     Disney's Miramax division, the same mainstream studio that 
     produced Shakespeare in Love, is responsible for Scream and 
     Pulp Fiction. Time-Warner is to blame for Natural Born 
     Killers and actually ran television ads promoting this film 
     as ``delirious, daredevil fun.'' (After it was criticized for 
     calling murder ``fun,'' Time-Warner tried to justify Killers 
     as social commentary; if you believe that, you believe 
     Godzilla was really about biodiversity protection.) Praise 
     and publicity for gratuitously violent movies come from the 
     big media conglomerates, including the newspapers and 
     networks that profit from advertising for films that glorify 
     murder. Disney, now one of the leading promoters of violent 
     images in American culture, even feels that what little kids 
     need is more violence. Its Christmas 1998 children's movie 
     Mighty Joe Young begins with an eight-year-old girl watching 
     her mother being murdered. By the movie's end, it is 20 years 
     later, and the killer has returned to stalk the grown 
     daughter, pointing a gun in her face and announcing, ``Now 
     join your mother in hell.'' A Disney movie.
       One reason Hollywood keeps reaching for ever-more-obscene 
     levels of killing is that it must compete with television, 
     which today routinely airs the kind of violence once 
     considered shocking in theaters. According to studies 
     conducted at Temple University, prime-time network (non-news) 
     shows now average up to five violent acts per hour. In 
     February, NBC ran in prime time the movie Eraser, not editing 
     out an extremely graphic scene in which a killer pulls a gun 
     on a bystander and blasts away. The latest TV movie based on 
     The Rockford Files, which aired on CBS the night of the 
     Colorado murders, opened with a scene of an eleven-year-old 
     girl in short-shorts being stalked by a man in a black hood, 
     grabbed, and dragged off, screaming. The Rockford Files is a 
     comedy. Combining television and movies, the typical American 
     boy or girl, studies find, will observe a stunning 40,000 
     dramatizations of killing by age 18.
       In the days after the Colorado slaughter, discussion of 
     violent images in American culture was dominated by the 
     canned positions of the anti-Hollywood right and the mammon-
     is-our-God film lobby. The debate missed three vital points: 
     the distinction between what adults should be allowed to see 
     (anything) and what the inchoate minds of children and 
     adolescents should see; the way in which important liberal 
     battles to win free expression in art and literature have 
     been perverted into an excuse for antisocial

[[Page S5198]]

     video brutality produced by cynical capitalists; and the 
     difference between censorship and voluntary acts of 
     responsibility.
       The day after the Colorado shooting, Mike De Luca, an 
     executive of New Line Cinema, maker of The Basketball 
     Diaries, told USA Today that, when kids kill, ``bad home 
     life, bad parenting, having guns in the home'' are ``more of 
     a factor than what we put out there for entertainment.'' 
     Setting aside the disclosure that Hollywood now categorizes 
     scenes of movies stars gunning down the innocent as 
     ``entertainment,'' De Luca is correct: studies do show that 
     upbringing is more determinant of violent behavior than any 
     other factor. But research also clearly shows that the 
     viewing of violence can cause aggression and crime. So the 
     question is, in a society already plagued by poor parenting 
     and unlimited gun sales, why does the entertainment industry 
     feel privileged to make violence even more prevalent?
       Even when researchers factor out other influences such as 
     parental attention, many peer-reviewed studies having found 
     causal links between viewing phony violence and engaging in 
     actual violence. A 1971 surgeon general's report asserted a 
     broad relationship between the two. Studies by Brandon 
     Centerwall, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin, 
     have shown that the postwar murder rise in the United 
     States began roughly a decade after TV viewing became 
     common. Centerwall also found that, in South Africa, where 
     television was not generally available until 1975, 
     national murder rates started rising about a decade later. 
     Violent computer games have not existed long enough to be 
     the subject of many controlled studies, but experts expect 
     it will be shown that playing such games in youth also 
     correlates with destructive behavior. There's an eerie 
     likelihood that violent movies and violent games amplify 
     one another, the film and television images placing 
     thoughts of carnage into the psyche while the games 
     condition the trigger finger to act on those impulses.
       Leonard Eron, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, 
     has been tracking video violence and actual violence for 
     almost four decades. His initial studies, in 1960, found that 
     even the occasional violence depicted in 1950s television--to 
     which every parent would gladly return today--caused 
     increased aggression among eight-year-olds. By the adult 
     years, Erons' studies find, those who watched the most TV and 
     movies in childhood were much more likely to have been 
     arrested for, or convicted of, violent felonies. Eron 
     believes that ten percent of U.S. violent crime is caused by 
     exposure to images of violence, meaning that 90 percent is 
     not but that a ten percent national reduction in violence 
     might be achieved merely by moderating the content of 
     television and movies. ``Kids learn by observation,'' Eron 
     says. ``If what they observe is violent, that's what they 
     learn.'' To cite a minor but telling example, the 
     introduction of vulgar language into American public 
     discourse traces, Eron thinks, largely to the point at which 
     stars like Clark Gable began to swear onscreen, and kids then 
     imitated swearing as normative.
       Defenders of bloodshed in film, television, and writing 
     often argue that depictions of killing don't incite real 
     violence because no one is really affected by what they see 
     or read; it's all just water off a duck's back. At heart, 
     this is an argument against free expression. The whole reason 
     to have a First Amendment is that people are influenced by 
     what they see and hear: words and images do change minds, so 
     there must be free competition among them. If what we say, 
     write, or show has no consequences, why bother to have free 
     speech?
       Defenders of Hollywood bloodshed also employ the argument 
     that, since millions of people watch screen mayhem and shrug, 
     feigned violence has no causal relation to actual violence. 
     After a horrific 1992 case in which a British gang acted out 
     a scene from the slasher movie Child's Play 3, torturing a 
     girl to death as the movie had shown, the novelist Martin 
     Amis wrote dismissively in The New Yorker that he had rented 
     Child's Play 3 and watched the film, and it hadn't made him 
     want to kill anyone, so what was the problem? But Amis isn't 
     homicidal or unbalanced. For those on the psychological 
     borderline, the calculus is different. There have, for 
     example, been at least two instances of real-world shootings 
     in which the guilty imitated scenes in Natural Born Killers.
       Most telling, Amis wasn't affected by watching a slasher 
     movie because Amis is not young. Except for the unbalanced, 
     exposure to violence in video ``is not so important for 
     adults; adults can watch anything they want,'' Eron says. 
     Younger minds are a different story. Children who don't yet 
     understand the difference between illusion and reality may be 
     highly affected by video violence. Between the ages of two 
     and eight, hours of viewing violent TV programs and movies 
     correlates closely to felonies later in life; the child comes 
     to see hitting, stabbing, and shooting as normative acts. The 
     link between watching violence and engaging in violence 
     continues up to about the age of 19, Eron finds, after which 
     most people's characters have been formed, and video mayhem 
     no longer correlates to destructive behavior.
       Trends in gun availability do not appear to explain the 
     murder rise that has coincided with television and violent 
     films. Research by John Lott Jr., of the University of 
     Chicago Law School, shows that the percentage of homes with 
     guns has changed little throughout the postwar era. What 
     appears to have changed is the willingness of people to fire 
     their guns at one another. Are adolescents now willing to use 
     guns because violent images make killing seem acceptable or 
     even cool? Following the Colorado slaughter, The New York 
     Times ran a recounting of other postwar mass murders staged 
     by the young, such as the 1966 Texas tower killings, and 
     noted that they all happened before the advent of the 
     Internet or shock rock, which seemed to the Times to absolve 
     the modern media. But all the mass killings by the young 
     occurred after 1950--after it became common to watch violence 
     on television.
       When horrific murders occur, the film and television 
     industries routinely attempt to transfer criticism to the 
     weapons used. Just after the Colorado shootings, for 
     instance, TV talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell called for a 
     constitutional amendment banning all firearms. How strange 
     that O'Donnell didn't call instead for a boycott of Sony 
     or its production company, Columbia Tristar--a film studio 
     from which she has received generous paychecks and whose 
     current offerings include 8MM, which glamorizes the sexual 
     murder of young women, and The Replacement Killers, whose 
     hero is a hit man and which depicts dozens of gun murders. 
     Handguns should be licensed, but that hardly excuses the 
     convenient sanctimony of blaming the crime on the weapon, 
     rather than on what resides in the human mind.
       And, when it comes to promoting adoration of guns, 
     Hollywood might as well be the NRA's marketing arm. An ever-
     increasing share of film and television depicts the firearm 
     as something the virile must have and use, if not an outright 
     sexual aid. Check the theater section of any newspaper, and 
     you will find an ever-higher percentage of movie ads in which 
     the stars are prominently holding guns. Keanu Reeves, Uma 
     Thurman, Laurence Fishburne, Geena Davis, Woody Harrelson, 
     and Mark Wahlberg are just a few of the hip stars who have 
     posed with guns for movie advertising. Hollywood endlessly 
     congratulates itself for reducing the depiction of cigarettes 
     in movies and movie ads. Cigarettes had to go, the film 
     industry admitted, because glamorizing them gives the wrong 
     idea to kids. But the glamorization of firearms, which is far 
     more dangerous, continues. Today, even female stars who 
     otherwise consider themselves politically aware will model in 
     sexualized poses with guns. Ads for the new movie Goodbye 
     Lover show star Patricia Arquette nearly nude, with very 
     little between her and the viewer but her handgun.
       But doesn't video violence merely depict a stark reality 
     against which the young need be warned? American society is 
     far too violent, yet the forms of brutality highlighted in 
     the movies and on television--prominently ``thrill'' killings 
     and serial murders--are pure distortion. Nearly 99 percent of 
     real murders result from robberies, drug deals, and domestic 
     disputes; figures from research affiliated with the FBI's 
     behavioral sciences division show an average of only about 30 
     serial or ``thrill'' murders nationally per year. Thirty is 
     plenty horrifying enough, but, at this point, each of the 
     major networks and movie studios alone depicts more 
     ``thrill'' and serial murders annually than that. By 
     endlessly exploiting the notion of the ``thrill'' murder, 
     Hollywood and television present to the young an entirely 
     imaginary image of a society in which killing for pleasure is 
     a common event. The publishing industry, including some TNR 
     advertisers, also distorts for profit the frequency of 
     ``thrill'' murders.
       The profitability of violent cinema is broadly dependent on 
     the ``down-rating'' of films--movies containing extreme 
     violence being rated only R instead of NC-17 (the new name 
     for X)--and the lax enforcement of age restrictions regarding 
     movies. Teens are the best market segment for Hollywood; when 
     moviemakers claim their violent movies are not meant to 
     appeal to teens, they are simply lying. The millionaire 
     status of actors, directors, and studio heads--and the 
     returns of the mutual funds that invest in movie companies--
     depends on not restricting teen access to theaters or film 
     rentals. Studios in effect control the movie ratings board 
     and endlessly lobby it not to label extreme violence with an 
     NC-17, the only form of rating that is actually enforced. 
     Natural Born Killers, for example, received an R following 
     Time-Warner lobbying, despite its repeated close-up murders 
     and one charming scene in which the stars kidnap a high 
     school girl and argue about whether it would be more fun to 
     kill her before or after raping her. Since its inception, the 
     movie ratings board has put its most restrictive rating on 
     any realistic representation of lovemaking, while sanctioning 
     ever-more-graphic depictions of murder and torture. In 
     economic terms, the board's pro-violence bias gives studios 
     an incentive to present more death and mayhem, confident that 
     ratings officials will smile with approval.
       When r-and-x battles were first fought, intellectual 
     sentiment regarded the ratings system as a way of blocking 
     the young from seeing films with political content, such as 
     Easy Rider, or discouraging depictions of sexuality; ratings 
     were perceived as the rubes' counterattack against cinematic 
     sophistication. But, in the 1960s, murder after murder after 
     murder was not standard cinema fare. The most controversial 
     violent film of that era, A Clockwork Orange, depicted a 
     total of one killing, which was heard but not on-camera. 
     (Clockwork Orange also had genuine political content, unlike 
     most of

[[Page S5199]]

     today's big studio movies.) In an era of runaway screen 
     violence, the '60s ideal that the young should be allowed to 
     see what they want has been corrupted. In this, trends in 
     video mirror the misuse of liberal ideals generally.
       Anti-censorship battles of this century were fought on firm 
     ground, advocating the right of films to tackle social and 
     sexual issues (the 1930s Hays office forbid among other 
     things cinematic mention of cohabitation) and free access to 
     works of literature such as Ulysses, Story of O, and the 
     original version of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the 
     Dead. Struggles against censors established that 
     suppression of film or writing is wrong.
       But to say that nothing should be censored is very 
     different from saying that everything should be shown. Today, 
     Hollywood and television have twisted the First Amendment 
     concept that occasional repulsive or worthless expression 
     must be protected, so as to guarantee freedom for works of 
     genuine political content or artistic merit, into a new 
     standard in which constitutional freedoms are employed mainly 
     to safeguard works that make no pretense of merit. In the new 
     standard, the bulk of what's being protected is repulsive or 
     worthless, with the meritorious work the rare exception.
       Not only is there profit for the performers, producers, 
     management, and shareholders of firms that glorify violence, 
     so, too, is there profit for politicians. Many conservative 
     or Republican politicians who denounce Hollywood eagerly 
     accept its lucre. Bob Dole's 1995 anti-Hollywood speech was 
     not followed up by anti-Hollywood legislation or campaign-
     funds strategy. After the Colorado murders, President Clinton 
     declared, ``Parents should take this moment to ask what else 
     they can do to shield children from violent images and 
     experiences that warp young perceptions.'' But Clinton was 
     careful to avoid criticizing Hollywood, one of the top 
     sources of public backing and campaign contributions for him 
     and his would-be successor, Vice President Al Gore. The 
     president has nothing specific to propose on film violence--
     only that parents should try to figure out what to do.
       When television producers say it is the parents' obligation 
     to keep children away from the tube, they reach the self-
     satire point of warning that their own product is unsuitable 
     for consumption. The situation will improve somewhat 
     beginning in 2000, by which time all new TVs must be sold 
     with the ``V chips''--supported by Clinton and Gore--which 
     will allow parents to block violent shows. But it will be at 
     least a decade before the majority of the nation's sets 
     include the chip, and who knows how adept young minds will 
     prove at defeating it? Rather than relying on a technical fix 
     that will take many years to achieve an effect, TV producers 
     could simply stop churning out the gratuitous violence. 
     Television could dramatically reduce its output of scenes of 
     killing and still depict violence in news broadcasts, 
     documentaries, and the occasional show in which the horrible 
     is genuinely relevant. Reduction in violence is not 
     censorship; it is placing social responsibility before 
     profit.
       The movie industry could practice the same kind of 
     restraint without sacrificing profitability. In this regard, 
     the big Hollywood studios, including Disney, look craven and 
     exploitative compared to, of all things, the porn-video 
     industry. Repulsive material occurs in underground porn, but, 
     in the products sold by the mainstream triple-X distributors 
     such as Vivid Video (the MGM of the erotica business), 
     violence is never, ever, ever depicted--because that would be 
     irresponsible. Women and men perform every conceivable 
     explicit act in today's mainstream porn, but what is shown is 
     always consensual and almost sunnily friendly. Scenes of rape 
     or sexual menace never occur, and scenes of sexual murder are 
     an absolute taboo.
       It is beyond irony that today Sony and Time-Warner eagerly 
     market explicit depictions of women being raped, sexually 
     assaulted, and sexually murdered, while the mainstream porn 
     industry would never dream of doing so. But, if money is all 
     that matters, the point here is that mainstream porn is 
     violence-free and yet risque and highly profitable. Surely 
     this shows that Hollywood could voluntarily step back from 
     the abyss of glorifying violence and still retain its edge 
     and its income.
       Following the Colorado massacre, Republican presidential 
     candidate Gary Bauer declared to a campaign audience, ``In 
     the America I want, all of these producers and directors, 
     they would not be able to show their faces in pubic'' because 
     fingers ``would be pointing at them and saying, `Shame, 
     shame.' '' The statement sent chills through anyone fearing 
     right-wing though-control. But Bauer's final clause is 
     correct--Hollywood and television do need to hear the words 
     ``shame, shame.'' The cause of the shame should be removed 
     voluntarily, not to stave off censorship, but because it is 
     the responsible thing to do.
       Put it this way. The day after a teenager guns down the 
     sons and daughters of studio executives in a high school in 
     Bel Air or Westwood, Disney and Time-Warner will stop 
     glamorizing murder. Do we have to wait until that day?

  Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, we include by reference--not printed in 
the Record of course--the hearings of 1993, 1995, and 1997 which are 
relevant today. In fact, they have been exacerbated by the events we 
have not only seen in Colorado, but in Kentucky and Arkansas in the 
various schools, but more particular, it has supported our case about 
the industry, the broadcasters, the producers--by Hollywood.
  Let's understand first the putoff we had and the stonewalling back in 
1990 when Senator Paul Simon said: What we have to do really--let's not 
rush into this.
  We have been rushing in since 1969. But in 1989 and 1990, we could 
not rush in, and we had to have a code of conduct. The reason they 
could not get it was because of the antitrust laws. So we put in an 
estoppel to the antitrust laws applying to this particular endeavor. We 
had the standards for depiction of violence and television programs 
issued by ABC, CBS, and NBC in 1992.
  Mr. President, this is what the programmers themselves said:

       However, all depictions of violence should be relevant and 
     necessary to the development of character or to the 
     advancement of theme or plot.

  Going further:

       Gratuitous or excessive depictions of violence are not 
     acceptable.

  Mr. President, that is word for word our amendment. What we try to 
bar is excessive, gratuitous violence during the family hour. It works 
in the United Kingdom. It works in Belgium and in Europe. It works down 
in Australia. It is tried and true and passes constitutional muster.
  We had this problem develop with respect to indecency. Finally, the 
Congress acted and we installed in law the authority and responsibility 
for the Federal Communications Commission to determine the time period 
of family hour, which has been determined from 6 in the morning to 10 
in the evening, and they barred showing of indecency on television in 
America. That has worked. It was taken to the courts. The lawyers 
immediately went to work, but the lower court decision has been upheld 
by the Supreme Court.
  The Attorney General of the United States appeared at our hearing 
before the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and said she 
thought it definitely would pass constitutional muster. We also had a 
plethora of constitutional professors come in. The record is replete. 
It is not haphazard.
  Let me quote entertainment industry executives and apologists saying 
just exactly what we say in our law:

       Programs should not depict violence as glamourous--

  I quote that from their own particular code of conduct--

       Realistic depictions of violence should also portray the 
     consequences of that violence to its victims and its 
     perpetrators.

  That was 1992. Let's find out what they did with the code of conduct.
  In 1998, there was a study sponsored by the National Cable Television 
Association. This is one of the most recent authoritative documents on 
the entire subject. It includes not only the National Parent-Teachers 
Association, Virginia Markel, the American Bar Association, Michael 
McCann, the National Education Association, Darlene Chavez, but--listen 
to this--Belva Davis, American Federation of Television and Radio 
Artists; Charles B. Fitzsimmons, Producers Guild of America; Carl 
Gotlieb, Writers Guild of America West; Ann Marcus, Caucus for 
Producers, Writers and Directors; Gene Reynolds, Directors Guild of 
America.
  What do they say? I cannot print the entire document in the Record, 
in deference to economy in Government. I read from the findings on page 
29:

       Much of TV violence is still glamorized.

  This was their code in 1992. There is no ``glamorized.'' Six years 
later, they themselves--the producers, the writers, Hollywood itself--
say:

       Much of TV violence is still glamorized. Good characters 
     are frequently the perpetrators of violence and rarely do 
     they show remorse. Viewers of all ages are more likely to 
     emulate and learn from characters who are perceived as 
     attractive. Across the 3 years of this study, nearly 40 
     percent of the violent incidents on television are initiated 
     by characters who possess qualities that make them 
     attractive.

  Heavens above. They prove our case for the amendment.
  Again reading from the study:

       Another aspect of glamorization is that physical aggression 
     on television is often condoned. For example, more than one-
     third of violent programs feature bad characters who are 
     never punished. Therefore, violence that goes unpunished in 
     the shortrun poses serious risk to children.


[[Page S5200]]


  Edgar Bronfman in the morning news said this is not something with 
the entertainment industry. But it is producers, it is writers, it is 
guilds, managers in Hollywood. I know if he had been in the liquor 
business, he would tell him to go on out there and find out what is 
going on.
  Reading further from their report:

       Violent behavior on television is quite serious in nature. 
     Across the 3-year study, more than half of the violent 
     incidents feature physical aggression that would be lethal or 
     incapacitating if it were to occur in real life. In spite of 
     very serious forms of aggression, much of this violence is 
     undermined by humor. At least 40 percent of the violent 
     scenes on television include humor.

  And on and on, from this particular report. It is really noteworthy 
that they prove our case. And to come up at this time saying that it 
does not have any effect, like they said on ``Meet the Press'' on 
Sunday, they would like to join in another study--and I understand the 
distinguished manager, the chairman, is going to ask for another study 
by the Surgeon General; and my distinguished chairman, the Senator from 
Arizona, he has joined in with the Senator from Connecticut to get 
another study.
  Whereas the broadcasters, they know the history of broadcasting. We 
ought to send them all this three-volume set. I quote from page 23. 
Writers receive numerous plot instructions. This is back in 1953, 46 
years ago. I quote:

       It has been found that we retain audience interest best 
     when our story is concerned with murder. Therefore, although 
     other crimes may be introduced, somebody must be murdered, 
     preferably early, with the threat of more violence to come.

  That is how you make money. They can put out all the language just 
like we do. I guess we are emulating them because we all talk about a 
surplus, a surplus, a surplus, when we have a deficit. They talk again 
and again and again how they are against this violence, and yet they 
continue, under their own study, to spew it out and have a definite 
effect out there in Colorado.
  Mr. President, I call my colleagues' attention to Senate Commerce 
Committee Report on ``Children's Protection From Violent Programming 
Act,'' S. 363, Report No. 105-89 and the report on the ``Children's 
Protection From Violent Programming Act of 1995,'' S. 470, Report No. 
104-117.
  Mr. President, let me agree, though, with Mr. Bronfman on this. And I 
quote Mr. Bronfman from this morning's Washington Post.

       ``It's unfortunate that the American people, who really 
     look to their government for leadership, instead get finger-
     pointing and chest-pounding,'' he said.

  I will read that again, because I agree with him. ``It's unfortunate 
that the American people, who really look to their government for 
leadership, instead get finger-pointing and chest-pounding.''
  There it is. We are experts at it when we call the $100 billion more 
we are spending this year on a deficit a surplus. When we say it is a 
legitimate gun dealer, and you have to have a background check, a 
waiting period, it has sidelined 60,000 felons. It is working. But 
yesterday, due to the stonewalling and influence of the NRA, we said 
no, you can go to a gun show and there is no background check.
  Can you imagine the Congress that has no shame whatever? I wish I 
were a lawyer outside practicing. I would take that case immediately up 
on the 14th amendment and the equal protection clause for the gun 
dealers and say that is an unconstitutional provision when you do not 
require it at the gun shows. I would easily win that case. So we are 
going to set that aside or hope it is brought immediately so we will do 
away with that. Maybe then they will sober up and we will get enough 
votes.
  Here today we are going to be faced again with the same stonewalling. 
They go down again and again and again, and they will say: There is no 
problem. We ought to have further studies.
  There is one other result I want to mention to my distinguished 
colleagues here in the Senate. I have already put in the 1972 report. 
But I ask unanimous consent the American Medical Association article 
``Television and Violence'' be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

 [From the Journal of the American Medical Association, June 10, 1992]

Television and Violence: The Scale of the Problem and Where To Go From 
                                  Here

                  (By Brandon S. Centerwall, MD, MPH)

       In 1975 Rothenberg's Special Communication in JAMA, 
     ``Effect of Television Violence on Children and Youth,'' 
     first alerted the medical community to the deforming effects 
     the viewing of television violence has on normal child 
     development, increasing levels of physical aggressiveness and 
     violence.\1\ In response to physicians' concerns sparked by 
     Rothenberg's communication, the 1976 American Medical 
     Association (AMA) House of Delegates passed Resolution 38: 
     ``The House declares TV violence threatens the health and 
     welfare of young Americans, commits itself to remedial 
     actions with interested parties, and encourages opposition to 
     TV programs containing violence and to their sponsors.'' \2\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
      *See footnotes at end of article.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
       Other professional organizations have since come to a 
     similar conclusion, including the American Academy of 
     Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association.\3\ In 
     light of recent research findings, in 1990 the American 
     Academy of Pediatrics issued a policy statement: 
     ``Pediatricians should advise parents to limit their 
     children's television viewing to 1 to 2 hours per day.'' \4\
       Rothenberg's communication was largely based on the 
     findings of the 1968 National Commission on the Causes and 
     Prevention of Violence \5\ and the 1972 Surgeon General's 
     report, Television and Growing Up: The Impact of Televised 
     Violence.\6\ Those findings were updated and reinforced by 
     the 1982 report of the National Institute of Mental Health, 
     Television and Behavior: Ten Years of Scientific Progress and 
     Implications for the Eighties, again documenting a broad 
     consensus in the scientific literature that exposure to 
     television violence increases children's physical 
     aggressiveness.\7\ Each of these governmental inquiries 
     necessarily left open the question of whether this increase 
     in children's physical aggressiveness would later lead to 
     increased rates of violence. Although there had been dozens 
     of laboratory investigations and short-term field studies (3 
     months or less), few long-term field studies (2 years or 
     more) had been completed and reported. Since the 1982 
     National Institute of Mental Health report, long-term field 
     studies have come into their own, some 20 having now been 
     published.\8\
       In my commentary, I discuss television's effects within the 
     context of normal child development; give an overview of 
     natural exposure to television as a cause of aggression and 
     violence; summarize my own research findings on television as 
     a cause of violence; and suggest a course of action.


         TELEVISION IN THE CONTEXT OF NORMAL CHILD DEVELOPMENT

       The impact of television on children is best understood 
     within the context of normal child development. Neonates are 
     born with an instinctive capacity and desire to imitate adult 
     human behavior. That infants can, and do, imitate an array of 
     adult facial expressions has been demonstrated in neonates as 
     young as a few hours old, ie, before they are even old enough 
     to know cognitively that they themselves have facial features 
     that correspond with those they are observing.\9\, 
     \10\ It is a most useful instinct, for the developing child 
     must learn and master a vast repertoire of behavior in short 
     order.
       Whereas infants have an instinctive desire to imitate 
     observed human behavior, they do not possess an instinct for 
     gauging a priori whether a behavior ought to be imitated. 
     They will imitate anything,\11\ including behaviors that most 
     adults would regard as destructive and antisocial. It may 
     give pause for thought, then, to learn that infants as young 
     as 14 months of age demonstrably observe and incorporate 
     behaviors seen on television\12\, \13\ (Looking 
     ahead, in two surveys of young male felons imprisoned for 
     committing violent crimes, eg, homicide, rape, and assault, 
     22% to 34% reported having consciously imitated crime 
     techniques learned from television programs, usually 
     successfully.\14\)
       As of 1990, the average American child aged 2 to 5 years 
     was watching over 27 hours of television per week.\15\ This 
     might not be bad, if young children understood what they are 
     watching. However, up through ages 3 and 4 years, many 
     children are unable to distinguish fact from fantasy in 
     television programs and remain unable to do so despite adult 
     coaching.\16\ In the minds of such young children, television 
     is a source of entirely factual information regarding how the 
     world works. Naturally, as they get older, they come to know 
     better, but the earliest and deepest impressions were laid 
     down when the child saw television as a factual source of 
     information about a world outside their homes where violence 
     is a daily commonplace and the commission of violence is 
     generally powerful, exciting, charismatic, and efficacious. 
     Serious violence is most likely to erupt at moments of severe 
     stress--and it is precisely at such moments that adolescents 
     and adults are most likely to revert to their earliest, most 
     visceral sense of what violence is and what its role is in 
     society. Much of this sense will have come from 
     television.
       Not all laboratory experiments and short-term field studies 
     demonstrate an effect of media violence on children's 
     behavior, but most do.17,18 In a recent meta-
     analysis of randomized, case-control, short-term studies,

[[Page S5201]]

     exposure to media violence caused, on the average, a 
     significant increase in children's aggressiveness as measured 
     by observation of their spontaneous, natural behavior 
     following exposure (P<.05).\19\


  NATURAL EXPOSURE TO TELEVISION AS A CAUSE OF AGGRESSION AND VIOLENCE

       In 1973, a small Canadian town (called ``Notel'' by the 
     investigators) acquired television for the first time. The 
     acquisition of television at such a late date was due to 
     problems with signal reception rather than any hostility 
     toward television, Joy et al \20\ investigated the impact of 
     television on this virgin community, using as control groups 
     two similar communities that already had television. In a 
     double-blind research design, a cohort of 45 first- and 
     second-grade students were observed prospectively over a 
     period of 2 years for rates of objectively measured noxious 
     physical aggression (eg, hitting, shoving, and biting). Rates 
     of physical aggression did not change significantly among 
     children in the two control communities. Two years after the 
     introduction of television, rates of physical aggression 
     among children in Notel had increased by 160% (P<.001).
       In a 22-year prospective study of an age cohort in a 
     semirural US county (N=875), Huesmann \21\ observed whether 
     boys' television viewing at age 8 years predicted the 
     seriousness of criminal acts committed by age 30. After 
     controlling for the boys' baseline aggressiveness, 
     intelligence, and socioeconomic status at age 8, it was found 
     that the boys' television violence viewing at age 8 
     significantly predicted the seriousness of the crimes for 
     which they were convicted by age 30 (P<.05).
       In a retrospective case-control study, Kruttschnitt et al 
     \22\ compared 100 male felons imprisoned for violent crimes 
     (eg, homicide, rape, and assault) with 65 men without a 
     history of violent offenses, matching for age, race, and 
     census tract of residence at age 10 to 14 years. After 
     controlling for school performance, exposure to parental 
     violence, and baseline level of criminality, it was found 
     that the association between adult criminal violence and 
     childhood exposure to television violence approached 
     statistical significance (P<.10).
       All Canadian and US studies of the effect of prolonged 
     childhood exposure to television (2 years or more) 
     demonstrate a positive relationship between earlier exposure 
     to television and later physical aggressiveness, although not 
     all studies reach statistical significance. \8\ The critical 
     period of exposure to television is preadolescent childhood. 
     Later variations in exposure, in adolescence and adulthood, 
     do not exert any additional effect.\23\\,\ \24\ However, the 
     aggression-enhancing effect of exposure to television is 
     chronic, extending into later adolescence and 
     adulthood.\8\\,\ \25\ This implies that any interventions 
     should be designed for children and their caregivers rather 
     than for the general adult population.
       These studies confirm what many Americans already believe 
     on the basis of intuition. In a national opinion poll, 43% of 
     adult Americans affirm that television violence ``plays a 
     part in making America a violent society,'' and an additional 
     37% find the thesis at least plausible (only 16% frankly 
     disbelieve the proposition).\26\ But how big a role does it 
     play? What is the effeft of natural exposure to television on 
     entire populations? To address this issue, I took advantage 
     of an historical experiment--the absence of television in 
     South Africa prior to 1975.\8\\,\ \25\


 television and homicide in south africa, canada, and the united states

       The South African government did not permit television 
     broadcasting prior to 1975, even though South African whites 
     were a prosperous, industrialized Western society.\8\ Amidst 
     the hostile tensions between the Afrikaner and English white 
     communities, it was generally conceded that any South African 
     television broadcasting industry would have to rely on 
     British and American imports to fill out its programming 
     schedule. Afrikaner leaders felt that that would provide an 
     unacceptable cultural advantage to the English-speaking white 
     South Africans. Rather than negotiate a complicated 
     compromise, the Afrikaner-controlled government chose to 
     finesse the issue by forbidding television broad-casting 
     entirely. Thus, an entire population of 2 million whites--
     rich and poor, urban and rural, educated and uneducated--was 
     nonselectively and absolutely excluded from exposure to 
     television for a quarter century after the medium was 
     introduced into the United States. Since the ban on 
     television was not based on any concerns regarding television 
     and violence, there was no self-selection bias with respect 
     to the hypothesis being tested.
       To evaluate whether exposure to television is a cause of 
     violence, I examined homicide rates in South Africa, Canada, 
     and the United States. Given that blacks in South Africa live 
     under quite different conditions than blacks in the United 
     States, I limited the comparison to white homicide rates in 
     South Africa and the United States and the total homicide 
     rate in Canada (which was 97% white in 1951). Data analyzed 
     were from the respective government vital statistics 
     registries. The reliability of the homicide data is discussed 
     elsewhere.\8\
       Following the introduction of television into the United 
     States, the annual white homicide rate increased by 93%, from 
     3.0 homicides per 100,000 white population in 1945 to 5.8 per 
     100,000 in 1974; in South Africa, where television was 
     banned, the white homicide rate decreased by 7%, from 2.7 
     homicides per 100,000 white population in 1943 through 1948 
     to 2.5 per 100,000 in 1974. As with US whites, following the 
     introduction of television into Canada the Canadian homicide 
     rate increased by 92%, from 1.3 homicides per 1,000 
     population in 1945 to 2.5 per 100,000 in 1974.
       For both Canada and the United States, there was a lag of 
     10 to 15 years between the introduction of television and the 
     subsequent doubling of the homicide rate. Given that homicide 
     is primarily an adult activity, if television exerts its 
     behavior-modifying effects primarily on children, the initial 
     ``television generation'' would have had to age 10 to 15 
     years before they would have been old enough to affect the 
     homicide rate. If this were so, it would be expected that, as 
     the initial television generation grew up, rates of serious 
     violence would first begin to rise among children, then 
     several years later it would begin to rise among adolescents, 
     then still later among young adults, and so on. And that is 
     what is observed.\8\
       In the period immediately preceding the introduction of 
     television into Canada and the United States, all three 
     countries were multiparty, representative, federal 
     democracies with strong Christian religious influences, where 
     people of nonwhite races were generally excluded from 
     political power. Although television broadcasting was 
     prohibited prior to 1975, white South Africa had well-
     developed book, newspaper, radio, and cinema industries. 
     Therefore, the effect of television could be isolated from 
     that of other media influences. In addition, I examined an 
     array of possible confounding variables--changes in age 
     distribution, urbanization, economic conditions, alcohol 
     consumption, capital punishment, civil unrest, and the 
     availability of firearms.\8\ None provided a viable 
     alternative explanation for the observed homicide trends. For 
     further details regarding the testing of the hypothesis, I 
     refer the reader to the published monograph \8\ and 
     commentary.\25\
       A comparison of South Africa with only the United States 
     could easily lead to the hypothesis that US involvement in 
     the Vietnam War or the turbulence of the civil rights 
     movement was responsible for the doubling of homicide rates 
     in the United States. The inclusion of Canada as a control 
     group precludes these hypotheses, since Canadians likewise 
     experienced a doubling of homicide rates without involvement 
     in the Vietnam War and without the turbulence of the US civil 
     rights movement.
       When I published my original paper in 1989, I predicted 
     that white South African homicide rates would double within 
     10 to 15 years after the introduction of television in 1975, 
     the rate having already increased 56% by 1983 (the most 
     recent year then available). \8\ As of 1987, the white South 
     African homicide rate and reached 5.8 homicides per 100,000 
     white population, a 130% increase in the homicide rate from 
     the rate of 2.5 per 100,000 in 1974, the last year before 
     television was introduced.\27\ In contrast, Canadian and 
     white US homicide rates have not increased since 1974. As of 
     1987, the Canadian homicide rate was 2.2 per 100,000, as 
     compared with 2.5 per 100,000 in 1974.\28\ In 1987, the US 
     white homicide rate was 5.4 per 100,000, as compared with 5.8 
     per 100,000 in 1974.\29\ (Since Canada and the United States 
     became saturated with television by the early 1960s, it was 
     expected that the effect of television on rates of violence 
     would likewise reach a saturation point 10 to 15 years 
     later.)
       It is concluded that the introduction of television in the 
     1950s caused a subsequent doubling of the homicide rate, 
     i.e., long-term childhood exposure to television is a causal 
     factor behind approximately one half of the homicides 
     committed in the United States, or approximately 10,000 
     homicides annually. Although the data are not as well 
     developed for other forms of violence, they indicate that 
     exposure to television is also a casual factor behind a major 
     proportion--perhaps one half--of rapes, assaults, and other 
     forms of interpersonal violence in the United States.\8\ When 
     the same analytic approach was taken to investigate the 
     relationship between television and suicide, it was 
     determined that the introduction of television in the 1950s 
     exerted no significant effect on subsequent suicide 
     rates.\30\
       To say that childhood exposure to television and television 
     violence is a predisposing factor behind half of violent acts 
     is not to discount the importance of other factors. 
     Manifestly, every violent act is the result of an array of 
     forces coming together--poverty, crime, alcohol and drug 
     abuse, stress--of which childhood exposure to television is 
     just one. Nevertheless, the epidemiologic evidence indicates 
     that if, hypothetically, television technology had never been 
     developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each 
     year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 
     fewer injurious assaults.\25\\,\ \31\


                         WHERE TO GO FROM HERE

       In the war against tobacco, the tobacco industry is the 
     last group from whom we expect any meaningful action. If 
     someone were to call on the tobacco industry to cut back 
     tobacco production as a matter of social conscience and out 
     of concern for the public health, we would regard that person 
     as being at least simple-minded, if not frankly deranged. 
     Oddly enough, however, people have persistently assumed that 
     the television industry operates by a higher standard of 
     morality than the tobacco industry--that it is useful to 
     appeal to its social conscience. This

[[Page S5202]]

     was true in 1969 when the National Commission on the Causes 
     and Prevention of Violence published its recommendations for 
     the television industry.\32\ It was equally true in 1989 when 
     the US Congress passed a television antiviolence bill that 
     granted television industry executives the authority to 
     confer on the issue of television violence without being in 
     violation of antitrust laws.\33\ Even before the law was 
     fully passed, the four networks stated that they had no 
     intention of using this antitrust exemption to any useful end 
     and that there would be no substantive changes in programming 
     content.\34\ They have been as good as their word.
       Cable aside, the television industry is not in the business 
     of selling programs to audiences. It is in the business of 
     selling audiences to advertisers. Issues of ``quality'' and 
     ``social responsibility'' are entirely peripheral to the 
     issue of maximizing audience size within a competitive 
     market--and there is no formula more tried and true than 
     violence for reliably generating large audiences that can be 
     sold to advertisers. If public demand for tobacco decreases 
     by 1%, the tobacco industry will lose $250 million annually 
     in revenue.\35\ Similarly, if the television audience size 
     were to decrease by 1%, the television industry would stand 
     to lose $250 million annually in advertising revenue.\35\ 
     Thus, changes in audience size that appear trivial to you and 
     me are regarded as catastrophic by the industry. For this 
     reason, industry spokespersons have made innumerable 
     protestations of good intent, but nothing has happened. In 
     over 20 years of monitoring levels of television violence, 
     there has been no downward movement.\36\, \37\ 
     There are no recommendations to make to the television 
     industry. To make any would not only be futile but create the 
     false impression that the industry might actually do 
     something constructive.
       The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that 
     pediatricians advise parents to limit their children's 
     television viewing to 1 to 2 hours per day.\4\ This is an 
     excellent point of departure and need not be limited to 
     pediatricians. It may seem remote that a child watching 
     television today can be involved years later in violence. A 
     juvenile taking up cigarettes is also remote from the dangers 
     of chronic smoking, yet those dangers are real, and it is 
     best to intervene early. The same holds true regarding 
     television-viewing behavior. The instruction is simple: For 
     children, less TV is better, especially violent TV.
       Symbolic gestures are important, too. The many thousands of 
     physicians who gave up smoking were important role models for 
     the general public. Just as many waiting rooms now have a 
     sign saying, ``This Is a Smoke-Free Area'' (or words to that 
     effect), so likewise a sign can be posted saying, ``This Is a 
     Television-Free Area.'' (This is not meant to exclude the use 
     of instructional videotapes.) By sparking inquiries from 
     parents and children, such a simple device provides a low-key 
     way to bring up the subject in a clinical setting.
       Children's exposure to television and television violence 
     should become part of the public health agenda, along with 
     safety seats, bicycle helmets, immunizations, and good 
     nutrition. One-time campaigns are of little value. It needs 
     to become part of the standard package: Less TV is better, 
     especially violent TV. Part of the public health approach 
     should be to promote child-care alternatives to the 
     electronic baby-sitter, especially among the poor who cannot 
     afford real baby-sitters.
       Parents should guide what their children watch on 
     television and how much. This is an old recommendation \32\ 
     that can be given new teeth with the help of modern 
     technology. It is now feasible to fit a television set with 
     an electronic lock that permits parents to preset which 
     programs, channels, and times they wish the set to be 
     available for; if a particular program or time of day is 
     locked, the set won't turn on for that time or channel.\38\ 
     The presence of a time-channel lock restores and reinforces 
     parental authority, since it operates even when the parents 
     are not at home, thus permitting parents to use television to 
     their family's best advantage. Time-channel locks are not 
     merely feasible, but have already been designed and are 
     coming off the assembly line (eg, the Sony XBR).
       Closed captioning permits deaf and hard-of-hearing persons 
     access to television. Recognizing that market forces alone 
     would not make closed-captioning technology available to more 
     than a fraction of the deaf and hard-of-hearing, the 
     Television Decoder Circuitry Act was signed into law in 1990, 
     requiring that, as of 1993, all new television sets (with 
     screens 33 cm or larger, ie, 96% of new television sets) be 
     manufactured with built-in closed-captioning circuitry.\39\ A 
     similar law should require that eventually all new television 
     sets be manufactured with built-in time-channel lock 
     circuitry--and for a similar reason. Market forces alone will 
     not make this technology available to more than a fraction of 
     households with children and will exclude poor families, the 
     ones who suffer the most from violence. If we can make 
     television technology available that will benefit 24 million 
     deaf and hard-of-hearing Americans,\30\ surely we can do not 
     less for the benefit of 50 million American children.\35\
       Unless they are provided with information, parents are ill-
     equipped to judge which programs to place off-limits. As a 
     final recommendation, television programs should be 
     accompanied by a violence rating so parents can gauge how 
     violent a program is without having to watch it. Such a 
     rating system should be quantitiative and preferably 
     numerical, leaving aesthetic and social judgments to the 
     viewers. Exactly how the scale ought to be quantified is less 
     important than that it be applied consistently. Such a rating 
     system would enjoy broad popular support: In a national poll, 
     71% of adult Americans favor the establishment of a violence 
     rating system for television programs.\40\
       It should be noted that none of these recommendations 
     impinges on issues of freedom of speech. That is as it should 
     b. It is not reasonable to address the problem of motor 
     vehicle fatalities by calling for a ban on cars. Instead, we 
     emphasize safety seats, good traffic signs, and driver 
     education. Similarly, to address the problem of violence 
     caused by exposure to television, we need to emphasize time-
     channel locks, program rating systems, and education of the 
     public regarding good viewing habits.


                               footnotes

     1. Rothenberg MB, Effect of television on children and youth. 
     JAMA. 1975;234:1043-1046.
     2. American Medical Association. Proceedings of the House of 
     Delegates, June-July, 1976. Chicago, Ill: American Medical 
     Association; 1976:280.
     3. Zylke JW. More voices join medicine in expressing concern 
     over amount, content of what children see on TV. JAMA. 
     1988;260:1831-1832.
     4. American Academy of Pediatrics, Committee on 
     Communications. Children, adolescents, and television. 
     Pediatrics. 1990;85:1119-1120.
     5. Baker RK, Ball SJ, eds. Violence and the Media: A Staff 
     Report to the National Commission on the Causes and 
     Prevention of Violence. Washington, DC: US Government 
     Printing Office; 1969.
     6. Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee on 
     Television and Social Behavior. Television and Growing Up: 
     The Impact of Televised Violence. Washington, DC: US 
     Government Printing Office; 1972.
     7. Pearl D, Bouthilet L, Lazar J, eds. Television and 
     Behavior: Ten Years of Scientific Progress and Implications 
     for the Eighties. Rockville, Md: National Institute of Mental 
     Health; 1982.
     8. Centerwall BS. Exposure to television as a cause of 
     violence. In: Comstock G, ed. Public Communication and 
     Behavior. Orlando, Fla: Academic Press Inc; 1989;2:1-58.
     9. Meltzoff AN, Moore MK. Newborn infants imitate adult 
     facial gestures. Child Dev. 1983;54:702-709.
     10. Meltzoff AN, Moore MK. Imitation in newborn infants: 
     exploring the range of gestures imitated and the underlying 
     mechanism. Dev Psychol. 1989;25:954-962.
     11. Meltzoff AN. Infant imitation after a 1-week delay: long-
     term memory for novel acts and multiple stimuli. Dev Psychol. 
     1988;24:470-476.
     12. Meltzoff AN. Imitation of televised models by infants. 
     Child Dev. 1988;59:1221-1229.
     13. Meltzoff AN. Memory in infancy. In: Squire LR, Byrne J, 
     Nadel L, Roediger H, Schacter D, Thompson R, eds. 
     Encyclopedia of Learning and Memory. New York, NY: Macmillan 
     Publishing Co. Inc; 1992.
     14. Heller MS, Polsky S. Studies in Violence and Television. 
     New York, NY: American Broadcasting Company; 1976.
     15. AC Nielsen Company. Nielsen Report on Television 1990. 
     Northbrook, Ill: Nielsen Media Research; 1990.
     16. Flavell JH. The development of children's knowledge about 
     the appearance-reality distinction. Am Psychol. 1986;41:418-
     425.
     17. Andison FS. TV violence and viewer aggression: a 
     cumulation of study results, 1954-1976. Public Opinion Q. 
     1977;41:314-331.
     18. Hearold S. A synthesis of 1043 effects of television on 
     social behavior. In: Comstock G, ed. Public Communication and 
     Behavior. Orlando, Fla: Academic Press Inc; 1986;1:65-133.
     19. Wood W, Wong FY, Chachere JG. Effects of media violence 
     on viewers' aggression in unconstrained social interaction. 
     Psychol Bull. 1991;109:371-383.
     20. Joy LA, Kimball MM, Zabrack ML. Television and children's 
     aggressive behavior. In: Williams TM, ed. The Impact of 
     Television: A Natural Experiment in Three Communities. 
     Orlando, Fla: Academic Press Inc; 1986:303-360.
     21. Huesmann LR. Psychological processes promoting the 
     relation between exposure to media violence and aggressive 
     behavior by the viewer. J Soc Issues. 1986;42(3):125-139.
     22. Kruttschnitt C, Heath L, Ward DA. Family violence, 
     television viewing habits, and other adolescent experiences 
     related to violent criminal behavior. Criminology. 
     1986;24:235-267.
     23. Milavsky JR, Kessler RC, Stipp HH, Rubens WS. Television 
     and Aggression: A Panel Study. Orlando, Fla: Academic Press 
     Inc; 1982.
     24. Hennigan KM, Del Rosario ML, Heath L, Cook TD, Wharton 
     JD, Calder BJ. Impact of the introduction of television on 
     crime in the United States: empirical findings and 
     theoretical implications. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1982;42:461-
     477.
     25. Centerwall BS. Exposure to television as a risk factor 
     for violence. A J Epidemiol, 1989; 129:643-652.
     26. Harris L. Too much TV violence. Harris Survey, August 4, 
     1977.
     27. Central Statistical Service. Deaths: Whites, Coloureds 
     and Asians, 1987. Pretoria, South Africa: Government Printer, 
     1989.
     28. World Health Organization, World Health Statistics 
     Annual, 1989, Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization; 
     1989.
     29. National Center for Health Statistics, Vital Statistics 
     of the United States, 1987. Hyattsville, Md: US Department of 
     Health and Human Services; 1990.
     30. Centerwall BS. Young adult suicide and exposure to 
     television. Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol, 1990; 25:149-
     153.
     31. Johnson JM, DeBerry MM Jr. Criminal Victimization. 1989: 
     A National Crime Survey Report. Washington, DC: US Department 
     of Justice; 1990.
     32. National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of 
     Violence, To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic 
     Tranquility: Final Report of the National Commission on the 
     Causes and Prevention of Violence. Washington, DC: US 
     Government Printing Office; 1969: 187-207.
     33. Dietz WH, Strasburger VC. Children, adolescents, and 
     television. Curr Probl Pediatr. 1991;21:8-31.
     34. Clark KR. Antiviolence law won't bring much change, 
     networks say. Seattle Times. August 10, 1989:F12.
     35. US Bureau of the Census. Statistical Abstract of the 
     United States: 1991. Washington, DC: US Government Printing 
     Office; 1991.
     36. Signorielli N, Gross L, Morgan M. Violence in television 
     programs: ten years later. In: Pearl D, Bouthilet L, Lazar J, 
     eds. Television and Behavior: Ten Years of Scientific 
     Progress and Implications for the Eighties. Rockville, Md: 
     National Institute of Mental Health; 1982: 158-173.

[[Page S5203]]

     37. Gerbner G, Gross L, Morgan M, Signorielli N. The Violence 
     Profile: Enduring Patterns. Philadelphia, Pa: Annenberg 
     School of Communication; 1989.
     38. Surgeon General's Northwest Conference on Interpersonal 
     Violence., Report Seattle, Wash: US Public Health Service; 
     1987:93-94.
     39. DuBow S. The Television Decoder Circuitry Act--TV for 
     all. Temple Law Rev. 1991;64-609-628.
     40. Los Angeles Times Poll. Television sex and violence. Poll 
     196. September 19, 1989. In: Opinion Research Service. 
     American Public Opinion Data. Louisville, Ky: Opinion 
     Research Service. 1989.

  Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, I am limited in time so I am going 
along:

       Following the introduction of television in the United 
     States, the annual white homicide rate increased by 93 
     percent from 1945 to 1974. In Canada during that same period, 
     the homicide rate increased 92 percent.

  This is really the clincher, Mr. President:

       In South Africa, where television was not introduced until 
     1975, the white homicide rate decreased 7 percent between 
     1943 and 1974; but by 1987, 12 years after television was 
     introduced in South Africa, the white homicide rate there had 
     increased by 130 percent.

  Mr. Bronfman says it has nothing to do with television. Come on. Give 
us a break. For those who come around now and say: We are going to have 
content, V-chip, and everything else, and we want everything else, we 
have the content, we all agree--we did not all agree. In fact, NBC, the 
premium television network, they didn't agree to a content-based rating 
system; it is voluntary. They said: I do not agree with that, and we 
are not going to do it. And they do not do it. But they are talking 
about content.
  BET, Black Entertainment Television, another responsible network 
group, said: We are not going along with that.
  But let's see what the Kaiser Family Foundation found out since they 
have put in now, for a couple years, the so-called content rating 
system. A 1999 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 79 
percent of shows with moderate levels of violence do not receive the 
content descriptor ``V'' for violence. Of course, NBC and BET do not go 
along with it.
  There is the program, ``Walker, Texas Ranger,'' which appears on the 
USA cable channel at 8 p.m. in the Washington, DC, area. It included 
the stabbing of two guards on a bus, an assault on a church by escaped 
convicts who take people hostage and threaten to rape a nun, and an 
episode ending where one escapee is shot and another is beaten 
unconscious. But the show did not receive the content descriptor ``V'' 
for violence.
  This is all in the most recent Kaiser Family Foundation study.
  The Kaiser study also found that no programs rated TV-G receive a 
``V'' rating for violence. Moreover, 81 percent of the children's 
programming containing violence did not even receive the ``FV'' rating 
for fantasy violence.
  And then a question. Let me quote this one:

       The bottom line is clear.

  This is from the Kaiser report:

       Parents cannot rely on the content descriptors as currently 
     employed to block all shows containing violence. There is 
     still a significant amount of moderate to high-level violence 
     in shows without content descriptors. And with respect to 
     children's programming, the failure to use the ``V'' 
     descriptor and the rare use of the ``FV'' descriptor leads to 
     the conclusion that there is no effective way for parents to 
     block out all children's shows containing violence, V-chip or 
     no V-chip.

  Then finally the Kaiser Family Foundation study says:

       Children would still be woefully unprotected from 
     television violence because content rating V is rarely used.

  So much for: Content, content; give it time; give it time to work; 
and everything else like that. They have no idea of that working. What 
about the V-chip?
  If you want to really spend an afternoon and tomorrow, try to toy 
with this one. I have a V-chip in my hand. I hold it up. You can get 
them there at Circuit City for $90.
  Who is going to spend the time to learn how to use this? Well, they 
are not. And 70 percent of those polled who use the rating system say 
they will not buy a V-chip. They are going to trust the children.
  How are you going to go through the average home that has three sets? 
Can't you see that mother in the morning chasing around--she has 64 
channels in Washington. It is all voluntary; it is not required. She 
does not know which channel is which. She has this thing. And, wait a 
minute, she has her 18 pages of instructions. So she chases around from 
the kitchen to the bedroom, down to the children's room, and she has 
the 64 programs, and she has her 18 pages of instructions, and it is 
complicated because they do not want the children to be able to work 
it. Well, by gosh, they have succeeded with me. I don't know how to 
work it. We tried yesterday afternoon when we had a little time. We are 
going to work on it some more. But I bet you my boots that my 
grandchildren will learn quicker than I. I can tell you that right now. 
They will know how to work this blooming thing. It is not going to 
happen. That was another sop in the 1996 telecommunications act. Those 
on the House side wanted the V-chip. It was another putoff, another 
stonewall. We knew it was impractical. We know it is easier to trust 
your children than to go through this charade and this expense and race 
around and try to figure out all of these things.

  When you have a dial on there, just turn that off. You don't need a 
chip. Just turn it off. Tell the children they cannot use it.
  Well, you say, the children are going to do it anyway. I tell you the 
truth, with all these rating things, if I was a kid and found out that 
something was naughty and it was rated where I couldn't see it, just 
being a child, I would say, well, wait a minute, we are going to go to 
Johnny's house. My parents got me, but there is nobody home at 
Johnny's. We'll see this thing.
  I mean, you really induce, excite, interest children with the rating 
system. It is counterproductive to begin with. But then the V-chip they 
talk about is just next to impossible.
  Let us go to the constitutional question, Mr. President. It is not 
the least restrictive. The family hour is the least restrictive. Under 
the court decisions with respect to this interference on free speech, 
it is not that we have an overwhelming public interest established, 
which we have in the record, but it has to be the least restrictive. 
The least restrictive, of course, is that that has been tried and true, 
the family hour approach that we have now submitted in the amendment.
  I hope they have enough pride to go along with what they have all 
voted. We voted this out in 1995, with only one dissenting vote. We 
voted it out in 1997, with one dissenting vote. I remember in 1995, the 
distinguished majority leader then, Senator Dole of Kansas, he went out 
there and he gave Hollywood--I hate to use the word ``hell,'' but that 
is what it is; that is what the newspapers said. He came back on the 
floor all charged up.
  So I went to him and I said: Bob, I got the bill in. It is on the 
calendar. You put your name on it, if there is some interest in the 
authorship or whatever it is, or make any little changes you want to 
make. I am trying to get something done. I have been trying with John 
Pastore since 1969, 30 years now, to get something done, get a vote.
  I said: Let's go ahead with it. But, no, no, the overwhelming 
influence of Hollywood, it stops us in our tracks. The overwhelming 
influence of the NRA, it stops us in our tracks.
  I agree with Mr. Bronfman. Mr. Bronfman is right on target: It is 
unfortunate when the American people, who really look to their 
government for leadership, they don't find it, because they are bought 
and sold.
  It is a tragic thing. You cannot get anything done around here. I 
have got a one-line amendment to the Constitution to get rid of this 
cancer: The Congress of the United States is hereby empowered to 
regulate or control spending in Federal elections. With that one line 
we go back to the 1974 act. We limit spending per voter. No cash; 
everything on top of the table; no soft money. One line says we can go 
back. We passed it in a bipartisan fashion back in the 1974 act, almost 
25 years ago. We were like a dog chasing its tail.
  But if we don't get rid of that cancer, you are not going to get any 
Congress. This Congress, instead of responding to the needs of the 
people with respect to spending and paying the bill in the budget, with 
responding to the gun violence around here where we take legitimate 
dealers and say you have to have a background, but the illegitimate 
shows, you say, yesterday afternoon, forget about it, and where today 
they want to move to table an amendment

[[Page S5204]]

that works in England and Europe, down under, New Zealand, Australia 
and everything else. Why not? Because we want that support from out 
there with that group.
  Of course, I think they own the magazines, the broadcasters, the 
Internet; they own each other. I can't keep up with the morning paper, 
who owns everything, but they are all owning each other. There is a 
tremendous, overwhelming influence for money, money, money. It is 
tragic, but it is true.
  We have to sober up here and start passing some good legislation that 
people have been crying out for--the Parent-Teacher Association, 
National Education Association, American Medical Association, American 
Psychiatric Association, with the 18 hearings that we have had, 300 
formative studies, over 1,000 different articles. Yet they say, well, 
wait a minute, that is on content. Let's see with the V-chip that is 
coming in July. They know it is a stonewall.
  Mr. President, I yield such time as necessary to the distinguished 
Senator from North Dakota.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I am pleased and proud to join my 
colleague, Senator Hollings of South Carolina, as a cosponsor of this 
amendment. I have worked with Senator Hollings since 1992 on this 
subject in the Commerce Committee. We have had hearing after hearing. 
This is a very big issue. We are proposing a baby step on a very big 
issue. It is likely that this baby step that we propose to take will be 
turned down by the Senate. We will see. Maybe I will be surprised 
today. I hope I will. But if the past is prologue, we will likely see 
the Senate decide it is not time or the amendment is not right or any 
one of 1,000 excuses.
  If ever there was an example of when all is said and done, more is 
said than done, if ever there was an example of that, it is on this 
subject. We have thousands of studies. We have had hundreds of hours of 
debate, many proposals. Almost nothing happens.
  Will Rogers said something once instructive, it seems to me. He said: 
When there is no place left to spit, you either have to swallow your 
tobacco juice or change with the times.
  On this subject, I say to my colleagues, it is time to swallow your 
tobacco juice. There is no place left to spit on this issue.
  Let me give you some statistics. As a parent, I am pretty acutely 
aware, but I have a 12-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter. We have 
a couple television sets, and they have switches on the sets. We try 
very hard to make sure they are not watching inappropriate television 
programming, but I tell you, it is hard. There is a lot coming through 
those sets at all hours of the day and night.
  Senator Hollings and I say, let us at least describe a block of time 
or have the Federal Communications Commission describe a period of time 
during which children are expected to be watching television, during 
family hour, and describe that that period will not contain excessive 
amounts of violence on television. Surely we can entertain adults 
without hurting our children. That is all this amendment says.
  Is it old-fashioned? Yes, it goes back to a time when we actually had 
a sort of understanding. During certain periods of the evening, during 
family time, during times when you would expect children to watch 
television, you won't have excessive acts of violence on television 
programming. Is that so extreme? Is that censorship? No, of course not.
  Let me read you some information. Before I do, let me mention, I said 
last night that by the time a young person graduates from high school, 
they have watched 12,500 hours of television. Excuse me, let me change 
that. They have sat in a classroom, 12,500 hours in a school classroom, 
and they have watched 20,000 hours of television. They are, 
regrettably, in many cases much more a product of what they have seen 
than what they have read. Let me read some statistics about what they 
are seeing on these television programs.
  By the end of elementary school, the American Medical Association 
reports from their studies, the average American child has watched 
8,000 murders on television and 100,000 acts of aggressive violence. 
That is by the end of elementary school. By age 18, these numbers, of 
course, have jumped, 112,000 acts of violence, and by age 18, the 
average young American has watched 40,000 murders on television.
  Now, one can make the point that it doesn't matter, it is irrelevant, 
and this doesn't affect anybody. I am not saying that just because when 
somebody sees an act on violence on television, they rush out the door 
and commit an act of violence on somebody else. But I am saying that 
the media have a profound influence on our lives. People spend $200 
billion a year advertising precisely because they feel it makes a 
difference--it makes a difference in terms of what people wear, what 
songs they sing, how they act, what kind of chewing gum they buy. It 
works--except when it comes to violence, we are told it is irrelevant 
and it doesn't matter.
  I would like to call my colleagues' attention to one little community 
in Canada. I have never been there; I never heard of it before, in 
fact. But a fascinating study was done in this town. It is a town 
called Notel, Canada. In 1973, this small community acquired television 
for the first time. It wasn't because this little Canadian town never 
wanted television; that wasn't the problem. The problem was that they 
had signal reception problems that could not be solved and so they 
didn't get television until much, much later. They didn't have any 
hostility to television; they just didn't get it. You had this little 
``island,'' this little town with no television. Somebody decided to do 
a study. They did a study concurrent with this community never having 
had television now receiving television for the first time. They did a 
double blind study and selected two other towns and then this 
community. Then they measured young people's behavior.
  I want to describe to you what they learned because it is exactly 
what you would expect: Television affects behavior. Violent television 
affects behavior.
  In the double blind research design, first and second grade students 
were observed prospectively over a period of 2 years for rates of 
objectively measured noxious physical aggression, such as hitting, 
shoving, biting, et cetera. The rates of aggression did not change in 
the two communities who had had television all along. Their rate of 
aggression was the same. But that community that just received 
television in 1973, which had been dark all those years because they 
could not get reception, they get television now, it is a new thing, 
and guess what happens? The rates of physical aggression among their 
children increased by 160 percent. The other two communities didn't 
change. The community that just began to receive television had a 
substantial increase in the rate of aggression among their children.
  What does that say? It says what we all know: Television affects 
behavior. At one of our hearings, we had testimony that said--do you 
remember the old ``Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles'' program? There was 
Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo and--perhaps the Senator from South 
Carolina can name the fourth. It's Raphael, I think. So you have four 
turtles, and they have sticks and they are beating up each other. It is 
interesting.
  We had testimony before the Commerce Committee that ``Teenage Mutant 
Ninja Turtles'' had to be produced two ways. One, with all of the full 
flavor of the hitting and the sticks and all of the things they were 
doing. And, second, they had to clean it up and tone it down because in 
some foreign markets they would not allow it to be imported into their 
television sets with that level of violence because they didn't want 
the kids to see that. So you make it at one level of aggression and 
violence for the U.S. market and then clean it up a bit so some of the 
foreign children aren't exposed to that.

  I thought that was interesting because it describes, it seems to me, 
an attitude here. The attitude has been: Let's keep pushing the limits. 
I think, as I said yesterday, television has some wonderful things on 
it. I laud those people who produce it. Some things I see are so 
wonderful and beautiful. I watch some of these channels. I have 
mentioned Discovery, the History Channel, and so many other things. 
Yes, the broadcast channels produce things I believe are wonderful as 
well. But I also have the right, believing that and saying that, to say 
there is

[[Page S5205]]

also a lot of trash. The first amendment gives people a right to 
produce trash as well. But is the first amendment an impediment for us 
to say to broadcasters that there are certain times in our living 
rooms, when our children are going to be expected to be watching 
television, that we ought to be able to expect a menu of television 
programming that is free from excessive violence? Is that an 
unreasonable proposition? I don't think so.
  The evidence, as described by the Senator from South Carolina, is so 
clear. After a couple of decades of research, the National Institutes 
of Mental Health concluded:

       The great majority of studies link television violence and 
     real life aggression.

  The American Psychological Association's review of research was 
conclusive. They said:

       The accumulated research clearly demonstrates a correlation 
     between viewing violence and aggressive behavior.

  You can throw these studies away and say it doesn't matter, that it 
is psychobabble. But, of course, we all know it is not. Every parent 
here understands that this is real.
  I mentioned last evening that if someone came to the door of my 
colleague, the Senator from Kentucky, or the Senator from South 
Carolina, and you had children in your living room playing and you had 
a television set that was turned off and somebody knocked on the door 
and said: We have some entertainment for your kids; I have a rental 
truck here and we have props and some set designs and I have some 
actors; I would like to bring them into your living room and put on a 
little play for your children. So you invite them into your living room 
and they put on a play. They pull knives and stab each other, they pull 
pistols and shoot each other, and they beat each other bloody--all in 
the context of this dramatic play, this mayhem and violence. And your 
children are watching with eyes the size of dinner plates. Would you, 
as a parent, sit there and say that it doesn't matter, that is fine, 
thanks for bringing this play into my living room? I don't think so. I 
think you would probably call the police and say: I have a case of 
child abuse in my living room. Shame on you for bringing that into my 
living room.
  Well, it is brought into our living rooms every day, in every way, 
with the touch of a button. Some say, well, the solution to that is to 
turn the TV set off. Absolutely true. There isn't a substitute for 
parental responsibility. But as a parent, I can tell you it is 
increasingly difficult to supervise the viewing habits of children.
  I introduced the first legislation in the Senate on the V-chip. I 
introduced it twice, in 1993 and in 1994. It is now law. The V-chip 
will be on television sets, but it will be a while before almost all 
television sets have them. Hopefully, that will be one tool to help 
parents, but it will not be the solution, just a tool.
  It seems to me that we ought to decide now, to the extent that we can 
help parents better supervise children's viewing habits, that we can 
tell broadcasters, and tell the FCC that we want broadcasters to know, 
there is a period of time when they are broadcasting shows into our 
living rooms that we want the violence to be reduced in that 
programming so as not to hurt our children. That is not unreasonable. 
That is the most reasonable, sensible thing in the world. We did it 
before in this country; we ought to do it now. We have done it for 
obscenity, and we ought to do it for violence. The Supreme Court has 
ruled that there is a period of time when certain kinds of obscenities 
and language ought not to be allowed to be broadcast because children 
will be watching or listening. And the Supreme Court has upheld that. 
The Supreme Court will uphold this. Again, I say, this is a baby step 
forward.
  Now, let me quote, if I might, the Attorney General of the United 
States, who testified at the Senate Commerce Committee hearing.
  She said:

       I am not at this hearing as a scientist. I am here as 
     Attorney General who has been concerned about the future of 
     this country's children and as a concerned American who is 
     fed up with excuses and hedging in the face of an epidemic of 
     violence. When it comes to these studies about television 
     violence, I think we are allowed to add our common sense into 
     the mix.

  She continues:

       Any parent can tell you how their children mimic what they 
     see everywhere, including what they watch on television. 
     Studies show children literally acting out and imitating what 
     they watch. The networks themselves understand this point 
     very well. They have run public service announcements to 
     promote socially constructive behavior. They announce that 
     this year's programs featured a reduced amount of violence, 
     and they boosted episodes encouraging constructive behavior 
     in each instance. Then they endorse the notion that 
     television can influence how people act.

  She says, further quoting her:

       As slogans go, I fear that ``Let the parents turn off the 
     television'' may be a bit naive as a response to television 
     violence, especially when you consider the challenge that 
     parents face in trying to convince children to study hard, 
     behave and stay out of trouble. Supreme Court Justice John 
     Paul Stevens compared this argument to saying that the remedy 
     for an assault is to run away after the first blow. Indeed, 
     many parents don't want to have to turn the television set 
     off. They want to expose their children to the good things 
     television can offer, like education and family-oriented 
     programs.

  I have watched television for a long time and have seen much good and 
much that concerns me. I have seen in most recent years an increasing 
desire to create sensationalized violence and intrigue in 
entertainment, most notably the shows about the police and the rescue 
missions.
  When I turn it on these days, there is one network that is 
particularly egregious. They have all kinds of shows where they get 
their television cameras and put them in the cop's car. I guess what 
they are doing is probably contracting with the police someplace, and 
then they are off and showing traffic arrests and drug arrests. The 
other night, I saw a case where a fellow was in the front seat of the 
police car with a camera for a television show. And they engaged in a 
high-speed chase of a drunk driver. The result, of course, was that at 
the end of the chase there was a dead, innocent driver coming the other 
direction hit by the drunk.
  My mother was killed by a drunk driver. My mother was killed in a 
high-speed police chase.
  I have spent years in the Congress proposing legislation dealing with 
drunk driving with high-speed pursuits and other things. I have also 
prepared legislation recently dealing with this question of whether our 
police departments should contract with television stations, having 
people with television cameras riding in the police car, of which the 
conclusion, incidentally, to a high-speed chase must be, it seems to 
me, to go ``get their man'' because that is going to make a good 
conclusion to the television program. The answer to me, though, is 
absolutely not.
  If they want to put a television camera in a police car for the 
entertainment of people on some television network, then I think we 
ought to subject them to a very substantial liability when somebody 
gets hurt as a result of it.

  I am, frankly, a little tired of turning on television and seeing 
television news cameras moving down the highways and above the highway 
recording high-speed chases, because they think it is excitement that 
people want to see. I am flat sick of seeing programs in which 
television network programs are riding with members of the police force 
because they can maybe record some violence for people who want to see. 
That is not entertainment, in my judgment. That is just more trash on 
television. I know some people like to watch it. But I happen to think 
people die as a result of it. Innocent people die as a result of it, 
and I think it ought to stop.
  But this issue of violence on television is something that Senator 
Hollings from South Carolina has been at it for a long time. We just 
had a man come to the Chamber a bit ago, Senator Paul Simon from 
Illinois. He is not a member of this body anymore. He retired. But he 
also joined us years ago. In fact, he was one of the earliest ones who 
talked about this issue. This issue has been around since the 1960s, 
and has been discussed among families for all of this decade.
  With respect to the efforts of the Senator from South Carolina, and, 
as I indicated, the proposal that he and I offer today to simply allow 
the FCC the authority to describe a period of time in the evening that 
would be described as family viewing hours is a baby step forward. 
Those who come to this Chamber and say that they can't

[[Page S5206]]

take this baby step, you can make excuses forever. You can make excuses 
for the next 10 years, as far as I am concerned. You defy all common 
sense if you say you can't take this baby step. The only reason you 
can't take this step is because there are a bunch of other big 
interests out there pressing on you saying we want to make money 
continuing to do what we are doing. What they are doing is hurting this 
country's kids.
  As I said when I started, surely we ought to be able to entertain 
adults in this country without hurting our children. And this is one 
sensible step that we can take. We did it before some years ago. We 
ought to do it again. It does no violence to the first amendment. It 
seems to me that it offers common sense to American families.
  Mr. President I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time?
  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I ask the distinguished Senator from Utah 
to yield to me 10 minutes.
  Mr. HATCH. I would be happy to yield 10 minutes to the distinguished 
Senator from Vermont.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I have talked with the distinguished 
sponsor of this amendment, the Senator from South Carolina, Mr. 
Hollings, with whom I have had the privilege to serve for 25 years--he 
has been here longer than that--and also with my distinguished friend 
from North Dakota, who has just spoken.
  Mr. President, as I told the distinguished Senator from South 
Carolina, I will have to oppose the amendment because of an agreement I 
made with a number of the industry groups a couple of years ago. I 
believe that agreement is still appropriate today. It is an agreement 
that brought about a compromise between Senators and industry to try to 
work them out, as we have with a number of other things, in a 
cooperative way, whether it is with legislation or legislative fiat. 
It involved a V-chip. I wanted to give the V-chip a fair chance to work 
in the marketplace, because I felt that technology was rapidly 
changing, and working in the marketplace might be a lot better than 
legislation that almost fixes technology where it is. I am enough of 
the old school that having made a commitment I am not going to go back 
on it.

  The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, 
the National PTA, the National Education Association, the Center for 
Media Education, the American Psychological Association, the National 
Association of Elementary School Principals, the Children's Defense 
Fund, and others agreed in writing on July 10, 1997, to allow the V-
chip system to proceed unimpeded by new legislation so that we could 
see how it works.
  Just last week, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a poll showing 
that 77 percent of parents said that if they had a V-chip in their home 
they would use the technology. With the rating system and the V-chip, 
each family can create their own individualized family viewing system.
  I think that would work a lot better in protecting children than the 
amendment we are considering.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, will the Senator from Vermont yield for a 
question?
  Mr. LEAHY. Certainly.
  Mr. DORGAN. It is a very brief question.
  As the Senator knows, I was the original sponsor of the V-chip that 
was first introduced in the Senate. The Senator from Vermont is 
describing an agreement. I am curious. The Senator mentioned a few of 
the outside groups who are party to the agreement. Which Senators were 
a part of that agreement? I was the original sponsor of the V-chip. I 
wasn't a part of that agreement.
  Mr. LEAHY. One of the reasons I didn't want to interrupt the Senator 
when he was speaking was that I wanted to hear his whole statement. If 
he would allow me to finish so that he may hear----
  Mr. DORGAN. Will the Senator yield for a question?
  Mr. LEAHY. I will indicate who the Senators were, because the Senator 
knows all of them well: Senator Hatch, the distinguished chairman of 
the Judiciary Committee; Senator Lott, the distinguished majority 
leader; Senator Daschle, the distinguished Democratic leader; Senator 
McCain, and others. I will give the Senator all of the names, but those 
are the ones who come to mind initially.
  Mr. DORGAN. I wonder. Could I have a dialogue about that following 
the statement? I don't intend to interrupt the statement. The Senator 
from Vermont mentioned five. There are 100 Senators. It would be good 
to have a dialog about that following the Senator's statement.
  Mr. LEAHY. I will be glad to put it in the Record. I ask unanimous 
consent to have printed in the Record the letter of July 8, 1997, 
signed by Senators, McCain, Burns, Leahy, Moseley-Braun, Daschle, 
Coats, Hatch, Boxer, Lott, as well as the numerous names I mentioned, 
such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Association of 
Elementary and School Principals, and others who signed. I will give 
copies to the distinguished Senator from North Dakota.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                                                  U.S. Senate,

                                     Washington, DC, July 8, 1997.
       Dear Colleague: The television industry and leading parent 
     groups have agreed on a series of improvements to the 
     Television Parental Guidelines System that will substantially 
     enhance the ability of parents to supervise their children's 
     television viewing.
       Given human subjectivity and the sheer volume of television 
     programming, no system will ever be perfect. However, we do 
     believe this revised system more closely approximates what 
     the Congress and American parents had in mind when the V Chip 
     legislation became the law of the land.
       It must also be remembered that development of a ratings 
     system is only the first installment of the promise the 
     Congress made to American parents. Until the V Chip is 
     readily available in the marketplace, parents will have 
     information, but not the means to act on it by blocking from 
     their homes programs they consider inappropriate for their 
     children. Therefore:
       (1) We will recommend to the FCC that it move expeditiously 
     to find the revised guidelines to be ``acceptable'' as 
     defined by the Telecommunications Act. Moreover, we believe 
     this should be the FCC's universally mandated system for 
     television set manufacturers to follow in putting V Chips 
     into television sets sold in this county;
       (2) To allow prompt and effective implementation of the 
     revised parental guidelines system, we believe there should 
     be a substantial period of governmental forbearance during 
     which further legislation or regulation concerning television 
     ratings, content or scheduling should be set aside. Parents, 
     the industry, and television set manufacturers will need time 
     for this revised system to take hold in the marketplace. The 
     industry will need time to adjust to the new guidelines and 
     then apply them in a consistent manner across myriad 
     channels. Set manufacturers will need to design user 
     friendly, V Chip equipped sets and bring them to market. And 
     most important, parents will need several years to utilize 
     all the tools given to them so that they may act to control 
     their children's television viewing. Additional government 
     intervention will only delay proper implementation of the new 
     guideline system.
       This has been a long and difficult process. We acknowledge 
     that any system should indeed be voluntary and consistent 
     with the First Amendment. That is why we believe the 
     voluntary agreement that has been reached, coupled with 
     forbearance on further governmental action as described 
     above, is the best way to proceed in order to balance 
     legitimate First Amendment concerns while giving American 
     parents the information they need in order to help them 
     supervise their children's television viewing.
           Sincerely,
         John McCain; Conrad Burns; Patrick Leahy; Carol Moseley-
           Braun; Tom Daschle; Dan Coats; Orrin Hatch; Barbara 
           Boxer; Trent Lott.
                                  ____

                                                    July 10, 1997.
       The attached modifications of the TV Parental Guideline 
     System have been developed collaboratively by members of the 
     industry and the advocacy community. We find this combined 
     age and content based system to be acceptable and believe 
     that it should be designated as the mandated system on the V-
     chip and used to rate all television programming, except for 
     news and sports, which are exempt, and unedited movies with 
     an MPAA rating aired on premium cable channels. We urge the 
     FCC to so rule as expeditiously as possible.
       We further believe that the system deserves a fair chance 
     to work in the marketplace to allow parents an opportunity to 
     understand and use the system. Accordingly, the undersigned 
     organizations will work to: educate the public and parents 
     about the V-chip and the TV Parental Guideline System; 
     encourage publishers of TV periodicals,

[[Page S5207]]

     newspapers and journals to include the ratings with their 
     program listings; and evaluate the system. Therefore, we urge 
     governmental leaders to allow this process to proceed 
     unimpeded by pending or new legislation that would undermine 
     the intent of this agreement or disrupt the harmony and good 
     faith of this process.

     Motion Picture Association of America
     National Association of Broadcasters
     National Cable Television Association
     American Medical Association
     American Academy of Pediatrics
     American Psychological Association
     Center for Media Education
     Children's Defense Fund
     Children Now
     National Association of Elementary School Principal
     National Education Association
     National PTA
                                  ____

                                                     May 12, 1999.
     Hon. Tom Daschle,
     Minority Leader, U.S. Senate,
     Washington, DC.
       Dear Senator Daschle: We are contacting you on an urgent 
     matter regarding the Juvenile Justice Bill now before the 
     Senate. Senator Hollings' ``safe harbor'' amendment runs 
     counter to the television ratings/V-Chip approach developed 
     two years ago.
       In July, 1997 together with members of the non-profit and 
     advocacy community we developed the combined age and content 
     based rating system. At that time, you and a number of your 
     colleagues agreed to a substantial period of governmental 
     forbearance so that the V-Chip television rating system could 
     have a chance to work in the marketplace. There is evidence 
     that this strategy is paying off. Just this week, the Kaiser 
     Family Foundation released a poll showing that 77% of parents 
     said that if they had a V-Chip in their home, they would use 
     the technology.
       Since the first V-Chip television set will arrive on the 
     marketplace in July, we should allow parents an opportunity 
     to understand and use the system before moving too quickly on 
     further legislation. We hope you will support the freedom of 
     parents to use their own discretion--and the V-chip--when 
     deciding what programs are appropriate for their families. 
     Therefore, we urge you to vote to table the Hollings 
     amendment.
           Sincerely,
     Jack Valenti,
       President & CEO, Motion Picture Association of America.
     Decker Anstrom,
       President & CEO, National Cable Television Association.
     Edward O. Fritts,
       President & CEO, National Association of Broadcasters.
                                  ____



                                   Center for Media Education,

                                     Washington, DC, May 12, 1999.
     Hon. Tom Daschle,
     Minority Leader, U.S. Senate,
     Washington, DC.
       Dear Senator Daschle: In July, 1997, together, with members 
     of the entertainment industry, we developed the combine age 
     and content based rating system. I favor this system and 
     believe that it deserves a fair chance to work in the 
     marketplace.
       This week, the Center for Media Education announced a 
     national campaign to educate parents about the V-Chip TV 
     Ratings system. The first V-chip televisions will arrive in 
     the marketplace in July. I urge governmental leaders to allow 
     parents an opportunity to understand and use the V-chip 
     system. I continue to believe that legislation such as S. 876 
     would undermine the intent of the agreement we signed on July 
     10, 1997.
           Sincerely,
                                         Kathryn Montgomery, Ph.D,
                                                        President.

  Mr. LEAHY. Obviously, our signing such a letter does not bind the 
distinguished Senator from North Dakota nor the distinguished Senator 
from South Carolina, as he and I have discussed. I do feel having 
stated my commitment binds me. As the Senator from North Dakota knows, 
I have a reputation of once having given a commitment I never go back 
on it. I do not suggest that he or anybody else is bound by the 
agreement that we worked out to give the V-chip a chance. I am 
suggesting that I assume the Senators who did sign on to that would 
feel that way.
  What we want to do is what I still want to do. I commend the Senators 
who worked on developing the V-chip, to allow families to create their 
own individualized family viewing system. I did this when my children 
were young by reading reviews and determining what they should or 
should not watch or read.
  Now 50 percent of the new TVs will have the V-chip by July 1 of this 
year; 100 percent of the new TVs will have the V-chip by January of 
next year. That is why Senators Hatch, Lott, Daschle, McCain, and 
others signed this letter, so we can ensure that the industry has 
guidelines and ratings and TV manufacturers will install V-chips. By 
doing that we move the ball forward very quickly. The TV manufacturers, 
as they promised us, are getting the job done.
  I want to live up to my signed commitment with the other Senators. I 
want to live up to the expectations of the AMA, the National PTA, the 
Children's Defense Fund, and the other groups I mentioned. TV parental 
guidelines and the V-chip give parents the tools to determine the 
programming children may watch.
  In addition, Charles Ergen, the CEO of EchoStar, said this could have 
serious unintended impacts. Echo-Star gives parents who subscribe to 
satellite service a powerful tool. His V-chip not only allows parents 
to block out R-rated shows, but they can block out shows based on 
specific concerns about language, drug use, violence, graphic violence, 
sexuality, or other considerations they might have.
  Under this amendment, even though they have done all that to 
cooperate with us, Echo-Star would be punished because they use 
national feeds and they transmit signals across time zones. They 
transmit not only into Kentucky or Vermont but in California, Oregon, 
Ohio, and everywhere in between. They go across the three time zones of 
this country. They provide the programming for multiple time zones at 
once on a national basis. I assume they probably do it in the time 
zones of Alaska and Hawaii, which goes even beyond the three in the 
Continental United States.
  Under the longstanding law, satellite carriers cannot alter the 
signals they are given which are authorized under a compulsory license. 
Depending on how long the family time period is, it may be impossible 
for satellite carriers to comply because they are required to use a 
national feed from distant stations. For example, on the west coast, 
the time is earlier than the east coast, where a lot of the programming 
originates. With the uplink of station WOR in New York or WGN in 
Chicago, an hour later, they are going to be in noncompliance with this 
amendment on the west coast.
  One option for them would be for satellite TV carriers to black out 
programming on the west coast or simply take the programming in the 
east coast and shift it to very late hours, extremely late hours for 
east coast viewers, which is the allowed hour for west coast viewers.

  Frankly, I think use of the V-chip allows parents to block out what 
they want and will work much better than blocking out entire time zones 
in the United States.
  I want to also note that two-thirds of American households have no 
children under the age of 18. If this amendment were enacted, American 
television viewers of all ages would lose control over the programming 
available to them. I repeat, two-thirds of American households have no 
children under the age of 18.
  There are, I believe, serious constitutional problems with this 
amendment. I get very concerned about the Federal Government or any 
Federal Government agency policing the content of TV programming.
  For example, there would be a $25,000 fine for each day there is 
violent video programming. Is one gunshot in a show considered violent 
programming? What about two? What if it is a history show that shows 
the assassination of a President or a world leader? Is that violence?
  I am reminded of the old joke of religious leaders of different 
faiths getting together and they wanted to start the meeting with a 
prayer, but they couldn't agree on a prayer so they had to cancel the 
conference.
  I worry once again that we denigrate the role of parents, especially 
the amendment which considers parents almost irrelevant to the 
development of children. I have been blessed to be married for 37 years 
this year, and I have three wonderful children. My wife and I took a 
very serious interest in what movies they saw, what TV programs they 
watched, what books they read. We tried to guide them the right way. I 
like the idea that both my wife and I were making those decisions and 
not somebody else. Someone else might have different moral values, 
might have a different sense of what was appropriate and what is not 
appropriate. I really didn't want to turn it over to

[[Page S5208]]

the hands of a government agency--local, State, or Federal. I felt that 
was my responsibility, a responsibility that I considered one of the 
most important roles I had as a parent.
  I also think if we let the government do it, let the government take 
over the parenting, then if something goes wrong, we blame them. It is 
harder to deal with issues such as bad parenting and lack of parental 
supervision if we can only blame ourselves, but that should be our 
responsibility as parents, first and foremost. It was the 
responsibility of my parents when I grew up in Vermont and the 
responsibility of my wife and I as our children grew up.
  I don't know how the government steps into the shoes of parents by 
involving our government in the day-to-day regulation of the contents 
of television shows, movies, or other forms of speech. I recently 
visited a country which is one of the last of the countries with such 
restrictions. I prefer we make those choices. Parents should be able to 
use the V-chips offered by satellite TV providers and by TV 
manufacturers to block out programming they consider offensive for 
their children.
  Anything any parents want to block out for their child, I don't care 
what it is--it could be C-SPAN, with me speaking now; if they can even 
get the children to watch it, they may want to block that out--that is 
fine; parents should have that right.
  I want to remind everyone that the Supreme Court has noted:

       Laws regulating speech for the protection of children have 
     no limiting principle, and a well-intentioned law restricting 
     protected speech on the basis of content is, nevertheless, 
     state-sponsored censorship.

  So, while I do not support this amendment, I do not want my comments 
to be interpreted as backing off at all in my pride in the work of 
Senator Hollings and Senator Dorgan on these issues. They are 
concerned, and rightly so, about the content of some of the things we 
see. There are some things, even if they are shown late at night, I 
would not watch and I am 59 years old. I was a prosecutor for 9 years. 
I went to murder scenes. I saw some of the most violent conduct ever. I 
still have nightmares remembering some of those scenes. I do not want 
to see them replayed.
  There are some, because of their offensive nature, I am not 
interested in. I do not want to see them, but I will make that 
decision. But for parents, for their help, we would not have the V-chip 
without the work of the Senator from South Carolina, the work he and 
his colleagues have done. It is not only work, it is agitation, I might 
say. I can almost repeat some of the speeches the Senator gave to push 
them that far forward. He gives new meaning to the term ``stentorian 
tones.'' They are stentorian tones in a clarion call, rarely heard 
anymore in these halls.
  I consider myself privileged, over the years, not only to have had 
the Senator from South Carolina as a close personal friend--both he and 
his wife are very close personal friends of my wife and myself--he has 
been a mentor to me. So I commend him for what he has done.
  I mention all this because he is not a newcomer to the debate. He has 
been a parent of this debate. I do not want anybody to lose sight that 
we all are in this together in this regard. If we have young children--
mine are now grown, but I assume it would be the same attitude as 
towards grandchildren--there are things on television, just as there 
are in the movies, that we do not want our children to see. Most of us 
do not want to see them ourselves, but we certainly do not want the 
children to see them. I think the system we have set up is one that is 
working. I would love to see something done in a cooperative way.
  It is moving rapidly forward. If that could be done without the hand 
of Government on it, it would make the Senator from Vermont far more 
comfortable. If they are unable to move forward, if they do not utilize 
the breathing spell they were given, that is one thing. But they seem 
to be moving forward during that breathing spell, and I would like to 
see that work without a heavy hand.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. HOLLINGS. I yield such time as necessary to the Senator from 
North Dakota.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I have great respect for the Senator from 
Vermont. I would not suggest he go back on an agreement he made with 
anybody. But I do want to make this point clearly. On January 31, 1994, 
I introduced legislation in the Senate calling for the V-chip. It was 
the first legislation introduced in the Senate on the V-chip. Within a 
year or so, with myself, my colleague and others, including Senator 
Conrad especially, and Senator Lieberman, the V-chip passed the Senate 
and became law. There is nothing, no agreement at all for most Members 
of the Senate about some V-chip versus any other restriction on 
legislative action.
  The letter that was read earlier, that might have been from some 
people who were not necessarily involved in the V-chip issue. I am the 
one who introduced it. There might have been some people who made some 
commitments to somebody else that they would not do something. That is 
their business. If there are 6 or 8 or 10 of them, that is their 
business. But that is not the business of the other 90 Senators. They 
have made no such agreement.
  This proposal complements the V-chip. This proposal works with the V-
chip. This proposal is not at odds with the V-chip, and there is no 
such agreement I am aware of with almost all Members of the Senate that 
we should not take this baby step forward on this sensible proposition.
  One more point: This is not content-based Government involvement. We 
already have a description that says if you are a television 
broadcaster you cannot, at 7:30 in the evening, broadcast the seven 
dirty words. You cannot do that. Why? Because we have decided certain 
things are inappropriate and the Supreme Court has upheld our 
capability of doing that through the Federal Communications Commission.
  It is also inappropriate, and we used to think as a country that it 
was, to broadcast excessively violent programs in the middle hours of 
the evening when children are watching. The Senator from South Carolina 
and I simply want to go back to that commonsense standard. Suggesting 
somehow that we have no capability or no interest in determining what 
some broadcaster somewhere throws into America's living rooms is just 
outside the debate about what is real. What is real is we have a real 
responsibility. That is what is being addressed by the amendment 
offered here by the Senator from South Carolina.
  Again, it is a baby step. I do not want anybody to be confused that 
somehow this is at odds with the V-chip. I introduced the V-chip. This 
is not at odds with the V-chip. It complements the V-chip, and this 
Congress and this Senate ought to agree to this amendment and we ought 
to do it this morning.
  Several Senators addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina.
  Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, how much time do I have remaining?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 11 minutes and 16 seconds.
  Mr. HOLLINGS. I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished Senator from 
Minnesota.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota is recognized for 3 
minutes.
  Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, first of all, I just came down after 
listening to the debate. I want to ask both my colleagues to put me on 
as an original cosponsor.
  The second thing I want to say is in this debate we have been having 
on this juvenile justice bill, part of the context for this has been 
the nightmare of Littleton, CO. That is always, ever present.
  I read a piece the other day--I don't even remember the author, I say 
to my colleague from South Carolina--but I thought it was very 
balanced. The author made the point: Yes, you want to go after the 
guns, but you also want to go after the culture of violence. I think we 
have to do both. Yes, you want to do much more for prevention for kids 
before they get in trouble in the first place. Yes, I argue, you want 
to have support services and mental health services. All these pieces 
go together.
  But if I could ask my colleague very briefly, will he just describe 
this amendment? Will my colleague just briefly describe the very 
essence of this amendment? Because it seems to me to be very, very 
mild. I want to be sure I am correct in my understanding.

[[Page S5209]]

  Mr. HOLLINGS. The essence of the amendment is to reinstitute the 
family hour, and during that time have no excessive, gratuitous 
violence. That is all it is. We do that right now with indecency, 
constitutionally, at the FCC level. Just say that excessive, gratuitous 
violence be treated similarly. It is working in the United Kingdom, it 
is working Europe and it is working down in Australia. It is tried and 
true. They want to restore it. To those people who say they want to 
restore family values, here is the family hour.
  Mr. WELLSTONE. I think it needs to be repeated one more time what a 
moderate, commonsense proposal we have here. This is constitutional. 
This is the right thing to do. As far as I am concerned, any steps we 
can take, albeit small steps, but significant steps that can reduce 
this violence, that can deal with this cultural violence, I think is 
absolutely the right thing to do. I add my support.
  I heard my colleague from Vermont speaking as a grandfather. Our 
children are all older, but we have children, and now grandchildren: 8, 
5 and almost 4. This is the right thing to do. There should be 
overwhelmingly strong support for this proposal.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time? The Senator from South 
Carolina.
  Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, I want to retain a little time here for 
the closing, but let me go right to the point with respect to the 
remarks of my distinguished friend from Vermont.
  We were not part of any agreement. That was another one of those so-
called stonewalls. The significant part of the agreement was the two 
leaders were on it, and the agencies and entities at that time were 
told that was all they were going to get. You learn in this town to go 
along with what you can get from the leadership.
  Don't come down to the floor and say it's a leadership vote, because 
the leader himself has voted this particular measure out of the 
Commerce Committee on two occasions. He knows the need of the V-chip 
being in all sets, 100 percent. Wait a minute. The average person holds 
onto his or her television set at least, they say in the hearings, 
between 8, 10, 12 years--or an average of 10 years. So you have a 10-
year period here. They are not going to replace all the sets. We know 
this with the digital television problem we have.
  In that light, we want to make absolutely sure we do something, as my 
distinguished friend from North Dakota says, that is consonant, 
helpful, and a part of the V-chip, if it will work. We have shown how 
complicated it is. It is going to be a delayed good, if any at all.
  I retain the remainder of our time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Utah.
  Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I should put all Senators on notice that we 
are just about out of time for debate with regard to the Hollings 
amendment on his side and I have somewhere near 42 minutes on our side. 
I intend to yield back some of that time so we can go to a vote on this 
matter.
  I understand Senator Cochran wants to take about 10 minutes to speak 
on this amendment. I will take a few minutes now.
  I rise to explain why I will ultimately move to table the Hollings 
amendment today. I struggled with this decision because there is much 
to be commended in my dear friend's amendment. I have a lot of respect 
for him. He knows that. I think it is important we work to make our 
culture safer for our families and for children, and that we make 
entertainment choices more family friendly. No question about it. We 
should certainly work to make television entertainment, which is so 
ubiquitous, less coarse, especially when children are watching.
  Having said that, I do have a number of concerns with this amendment. 
Members of the satellite television industry, which we are working to 
make more competitive with cable, have expressed concerns with this 
amendment. Because much of the fare on satellites is delivered 
nationally, they will have difficulty complying. If a satellite carrier 
picks up programming on the east coast, where much programming 
originates, it will likely be out of compliance, given that fare 
appropriate for later hours on the east coast will be beamed 
simultaneously across the time zones to viewers on the west coast, and 
across the country, where obviously it will be earlier.
  Additionally, opponents of this amendment have raised constitutional 
concerns. Although I have not had an opportunity to review or visit all 
of these constitutional issues, I do not believe that the 
constitutional concerns are clearly right or that opponents have an 
open-and-shut constitutional case. I do believe the issues bear careful 
consideration.
  Most of all, I must vote to table this amendment because of a 
commitment I made to my colleagues in 1997 in connection with getting 
the voluntary television ratings and V-chip systems in place. At that 
time, I was approached by a number of colleagues to sign a Dear 
Colleague letter taking a stand against regulating television ratings, 
content, or scheduling until those systems had time to get underway.
  That Dear Colleague letter is dated July 8, 1997, and was signed by 
Senators Lott, Daschle, McCain, Leahy, as well as myself, and other 
Republicans and Democrats. I made that commitment then and I believe I 
need to honor it now.
  Some may believe that an earlier amendment which I supported had a 
similar impact. The Brownback-Hatch-Lieberman amendment allowed the 
industry to develop a voluntary code of conduct but did not impose any 
regulations on the industry. It also was a comprehensive amendment and 
had much greater application than the television ratings, content, and 
scheduling at issue in the V-chip and ratings process. It applied to 
television, movies, music, video games, and the Internet. At that time 
yesterday, I recognized my earlier commitment and raised and 
distinguished it.
  Therefore, although I find much to commend in the amendment of the 
Senator from South Carolina, because of my prior commitment to forbear 
from supporting legislation or recommendation concerning television 
ratings, content, or scheduling, I believe I must honor that pledge to 
my colleagues and vote to table the Hollings amendment.
  There is a lot of very bad programming on television in our country 
today. I think the satellite viewership problem is a big problem. To 
make someone liable because they have to carry the satellite 
transmission at a time that fits within the time constraints of this 
amendment on the west coast--coming from the east coast, it may be in 
compliance, but the west coast may not be, and the satellite 
transmitter will be liable--is a matter of great problematic concern to 
me.
  I share the same concern my friend from South Carolina shares with 
regard to what is being televised and on the airwaves today, especially 
during times when young people are watching. On the other hand, I have 
a very strong commitment to uphold the first amendment and to be very 
reticent to start dictating what can and cannot be done on network 
television or on television, period.
  As for cleaning up the media, we did have the Brownback-Hatch-
Lieberman amendment. Senators Brownback and Lieberman have worked long 
and hard to come up with some solutions that hopefully will be 
voluntary, that hopefully will resolve these questions.
  That amendment yesterday was adopted overwhelmingly. It requires the 
FTC and Department of Justice to do a comprehensive study of the 
entertainment industry. It seems to me that is a very reasonable, 
important thing to do and we ought to get that information before we 
make any final decisions in this area.
  Also, it had a provision asking the National Institutes of Health to 
study the impact of violence and unsuitable material on children and 
child development. That brought a lot of angst to a number of people. 
Having the FTC look into these things brought a lot of angst to a lot 
of people. I might add, having the Department of Justice do it has 
caused a lot of concern.
  I think that amendment, including its other provisions on antitrust, 
will go a long way toward cleaning up the exposure of minors to violent 
material. I would like to see that work and I would like to see these 
studies done before we go this drastically to a solution in the Senate.
  At the appropriate time I will move to table the amendment, and I 
hope my colleagues will support the motion to

[[Page S5210]]

table with the commitment from me--and I think others will make it, 
too--that we will continue to revisit this area, because we are all 
concerned. It is not only the province of those who are for this 
amendment; all of us are concerned about what is happening to our 
children in our society today.
  I see that Senator Cochran has arrived. I yield 10 minutes to Senator 
Cochran.
  Mrs. BOXER. Will the Senator put me on that list for 10 minutes when 
Senator Cochran has finished?
  Mr. HATCH. I will be happy to do that. I suppose the Senator from 
South Carolina wants to end the debate, and then I will yield back 
whatever time I have remaining at that time.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Cochran be given 
10 minutes; immediately following Senator Cochran, Senator Boxer be 
given 10 minutes; and immediately following Senator Boxer, Senator 
Sessions be given 10 minutes. Then I will be prepared to yield back the 
remainder of our time as soon as the Senator from South Carolina is 
through.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The 
Senator from Mississippi.
  Mr. COCHRAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I may 
proceed as in morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. COCHRAN. I thank the Chair.
  (The remarks of Mr. Cochran pertaining to the introduction of S. 1029 
are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills 
and Joint Resolutions.'')
  Mr. COCHRAN. Mr. President, I thank my distinguished friend from Utah 
for yielding me time from his debate.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California is recognized for 
10 minutes under unanimous consent.
  Mrs. BOXER. Thank you very much, Mr. President.
  It is rare that I disagree with my wonderful friend, Fritz Hollings, 
and my wonderful friend, Byron Dorgan, but I do on this particular 
amendment that is pending before us. I think the debate is about this: 
Do we believe there is violence in the entertainment industry? Yes. So 
there is agreement there. Does it upset all of us when we see it, when 
we know kids are seeing it? Yes.
  But how should we deal with it? Should Government become parents and 
decide what our kids watch or should Government give parents the tools 
to decide what their kids should watch? And I come down on the side of 
making sure Government gives parents the tools to decide what their 
children should watch, and not on the side of those who in essence want 
the Government, through the bureaucracy, the FCC, to determine what 
shows should or should not be on television.
  Again, I do not know who is in the FCC. I think I know the chairman. 
I think he is a terrific person. But I do not want to say that the FCC 
members know more about our country's children than the parents do. So 
if Government can play the role of giving parents the power to 
determine what their kids watch, I think we are doing the right thing. 
As a matter of fact, 2 years ago that is what we did do. We required 
that all new television sets have a V-chip installed. And 50 percent of 
all the new sets will have the V-chip by July 1; and all the new sets 
will have it by January 1. So we are moving to the point where all TV 
sets will have the V-chip when you buy it.
  I think it is a smart answer, the V-chip, to dealing with the issue 
of violence on television. It is a chip that allows the parents to 
program what shows their children can and cannot see. There you have 
it. Very simply, it is government doing what I think is the right 
thing, giving parents this tool, this powerful tool, putting the 
parents in charge, not the government in charge.
  I worry about going down that path of giving the FCC or any other 
agency or, frankly, any Senator the power to decide what show goes on 
at what time. It is very subjective; it is a path that I think we 
should avoid.
  Now, the Center for Media Education, which helped develop the TV 
rating system and is undertaking a national campaign to educate parents 
about the V-chip, they do not like this particular proposal that is 
before us. They say ``it would undermine the intent'' of the voluntary 
rating system and the V-chip.
  So why would we, 2 years ago, work very hard, all of us together, to 
develop this V-chip and then, in the stroke of a vote, if we were to 
pass the Hollings amendment, undermine what the purpose was of that V-
chip?
  Also, the Senate yesterday adopted the Brownback amendment, and we 
know that is going to launch into an investigation of the entertainment 
industry to see whether it is marketing to kids violent programming. An 
amendment of mine would also extend that to investigate the gun 
manufacturers.
  I was very happy to see the Senate accept that, because, as I said 
yesterday, to point the finger of blame at one industry is outrageous. 
To point the finger of blame at one person or one group of people is 
outrageous. There is not one of us who can walk away from the issue of 
our violent culture and say: It has nothing to do with me. I am just 
perfect. It is the other guy.

  So we undertook this issue 2 years ago. We passed this V-chip 
proposal. Senator Brownback, yesterday, encouraged the entertainment 
industry to step up to the plate and develop solutions by giving an 
antitrust exemption to the entertainment industry so they can sit down 
together to come up with even more solutions than the V-chip, because, 
frankly, they need to talk to one another. If it means they say at a 
certain time we are not going to show these violent shows, that would 
be terrific. That would be helpful, and that would mean that the 
parents' job is easier. They don't have to worry as much as they do 
now. I agree, they have to worry plenty now.
  I also want to do this because it is very easy to get up here and 
blast an industry. In every industry, there are some positive steps. 
Even the gun manufacturers, which I believe are marketing to children, 
and many of them are not responsible, there are some who are selling 
their guns with child safety locks, and they are doing it on a 
voluntary basis. I praise them. As a matter of fact, the President had 
those companies to the White House, and he praised them.
  I think we ought to look at some of the good things the entertainment 
industry is doing for our children. Viacom, through the Nickelodeon 
channel, periodically airs programs to help children work through 
violence-related issues. In this example that I am going to give you, 
all these examples, I am not going to mention PBS, because they are 
incredible as far as producing programs for our children that are 
wonderful.
  I was sitting watching one of the programs with my grandchild the 
other day, and kids were talking to each other, young kids, about 10, 
11, about the pressures in their lives. It was terrific. I enjoyed it. 
I think my little grandson was too young to understand it. But for the 
9-year-olds, the 8-year-olds, the 10-year-olds, there are some good 
things.
  MTV has ``Fight For Your Rights, Take a Stand Against Violence.'' It 
is a program that gives young people advice on reducing violence in 
their communities. Now, they also do some things on there that do not 
give that message. I agree. But are we just going to bash and bash and 
bash? Let's at least recognize there are some efforts here.
  The Walt Disney Company has produced and aired numerous public 
service announcements on issues such as school violence and has 
featured in its evening TV shows various antiviolence themes.
  We want more of that, and if we don't get more of that, we are going 
to just make sure that parents can, in fact, program their TVs so the 
kids do not see the garbage and the violence and the death and all of 
the things that Senator Hollings is right to point out are impacting 
and influencing our children.
  There are shows and episodes that glorify violence, and there are 
shows and episodes that denounce violence.
  I think we need to be careful in this amendment of the slippery slope 
we could go down if we decide in our frustration and our worry about 
our children that government should step in and become the parents. The 
V-chip, the Brownback amendment, those two things give parents the 
tools they need

[[Page S5211]]

and lets the industry sit down together and focus on the issue of 
violence.
  So we have some efforts underway that are very important. I do not 
want to see us short circuit those efforts.
  This is a difficult issue because we know we have a problem here. 
When we have a problem, let us take steps that don't lead us into 
another problem. We had a debate in front of the Commerce Committee. I 
was there and had the opportunity to testify before my friend. It had 
to do with ratings. There was a big debate over whether government 
should rate these movies and TV shows or whether the industry should 
undertake it. I will never forget this. One Congressman came up and he 
said: I can't believe what I just saw on TV.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's 10 minutes have expired.
  Mrs. BOXER. I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute.
  Mr. HATCH. That would be fine.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The 
Senator is recognized.
  Mrs. BOXER. I remember what happened then. This Congressman came over 
from the other side and testified that he couldn't believe that 
``Schindler's List'' was put on TV and that he felt ``Schindler's 
List'' had obscenity in it. A big debate ensued, because many thought 
``Schindler's List'' was one of the best things that was shown on TV, 
that it taught our young people about the Holocaust. There were some 
rough scenes in it that were historically accurate.
  All it proved to me is that the eye of the beholder is so important 
here. Here was someone saying that was one of the best things you could 
put on TV to teach our children, and here is somebody else saying it 
was one of the worst things.
  Keep government out of these subjective decisions. Give parents the 
tools. Let them decide if ``Schindler's List'' is right for their 
children, or any other program.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, violence in television shows, video games, 
and movies horrifies us as parents and grandparents. However, I support 
the tabling of the Hollings amendment because, in my judgment, it would 
have gone too far in giving the Government the responsibility for 
keeping violent television programming away from our children. The 
principal responsibility belongs in the hands of parents and 
grandparents. Putting this responsibility in an agency like the FCC to 
determine what is too violent and what is not is not only of 
questionable constitutionality, it would foster the idea that the 
Government should be doing this job. That confuses and defuses the 
clear message to parents that the principal responsibility is theirs. 
We should give parents the tools to do this as we have tried to do 
through the ``V-chip'' filtering technology. The first V-chip equipped 
televisions are expected to become available this summer. We should 
also focus the principal responsibility on parents, so that the V-chip 
is effectively used.
  Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, the advent of the television began the 
extraordinary advance in video technology. Families came together to 
witness such great programs as: The Andy Griffith Show, I Love Lucy, 
Leave it to Beaver, and Father Knows Best. The television 
revolutionized technology and media, and replaced the radio as the main 
source of family entertainment. The television is an instrumental part 
of American society, it provides us with news, education, and 
entertainment and will likely continue to do so.
  In recent years, however, the entertainment industry has promoted 
programming unfit for the children of the next generation. No longer 
can families come together to watch television without having to see 
material unfit for their children. In the wake of recent events, it has 
become clear that exposure to violent programming does in fact play an 
influential role in children's behavior. It is regrettable that it has 
come to the point where it may be necessary for Congress to take action 
in the oversight of television programming. The Children's Protection 
from Violent Programming Act creates a ``safe harbor'' and eliminates 
the broadcast of violent programming aired during hours when children 
are likely to be a substantial portion of the viewing audience.
  While I have reservations with this amendment, I am willing to stand 
in support of it. Admittedly, this amendment gives the Federal 
Communications Commission additional power to regulate television 
programming--even when two-thirds of American households have no 
children under the age of 18. Clearly this amendment will restrict the 
programming available to viewers of all ages. I also have reservations 
since the TV rating system, already in place, will provide parents with 
specific information about the content of a television program. V-chips 
will be incorporated into all new television sets by January 1, 2000. 
In addition, I am concerned that by passing this legislation, we will 
be giving the Federal Communications Commission additional authority to 
define violent programming far beyond that which is necessary.
  The fact of the matter is that to date the entertainment industry has 
not yet taken responsibility for themselves. Television programs of an 
adult nature are undermining and contradicting the virtues parents are 
trying to teach. Likewise, research from more than ten thousand 
medical, pediatric, psychological, and sociological studies show that 
television violence increases violent and aggressive behavior in 
society. Astonishingly, the murder rate in the United States doubled 
within 15 years after television was introduced into American homes.
  It pains me to stand before you today and say that the federal 
government may need to regulate yet another industry. What we need is 
smaller, smarter government. Without the cooperation of television 
networks, however, Congress has no choice but to give the FCC the 
authority to impose itself upon the entertainment industry. Each of us, 
Congress, television networks, and parents need to come together for 
the sake of our children. Our children are the future of this country, 
and if we as a nation are going to live together in peace, each of us 
must take the responsibility to teach our children the difference 
between right and wrong.
  Mr. DODD. Mr. President, it is my intention to vote to table the 
Hollings amendment regarding television programming and I wanted to say 
a few words about why I am going to cast this vote. Television can be a 
valuable entertainment and educational tool and I commend my good 
friend, Senator Hollings for his work in this important area. I share 
his concern for the impact that violent programming has on children.
  However, I have concerns about a government entity, the FCC, 
determining for everyone what is deemed ``violent programming''. This 
amendment has critical free speech implications. What would constitute 
violent programming? Would a documentary or an historical piece be 
deemed as such because it depicted violent acts or victims of violence? 
These determinations are best made by parents--the people who know 
their children best. The impact of this amendment would be overly 
broad. In fact, two-thirds of American households have no children 
under the age of 18. Further, I have concerns about the government 
mandating another solution before current technology practices have 
been given a chance. Most television broadcast and cable networks have 
implemented a voluntary ratings system that gives advance information 
about program content. The TV Parental Guidelines were designed in 
consultation with advocacy groups and approved for use by the Federal 
Communications Commission last year. These voluntary systems are an 
important step in the right direction, because it allows us to think 
more carefully about what we watch and what our children watch.
  Congress also required that an electronic chip, called a V-chip, be 
included in newly manufactured television sets to allow parents to 
screen out material that they find inappropriate for their children. 
The first television sets equipped with V-chips will arrive in stores 
July 1, 1999; all new sets will contain a V-chip by July 1, 2000. I 
support the use of this valuable and innovative technology which 
enhances our ability to make careful choices.
  Just this week, FCC Commissioner William Kennard announced the 
creation of a task force to monitor and assist in the roll-out of the 
V-chip. Special emphasis will be given to educate

[[Page S5212]]

parents about the availability and use of the technology. In fact, the 
Kaiser Family Foundation recently released a poll stating that 77 
percent of parents said that if they had a V-chip in their home, they 
would use it.
  We need to give the integrated V-chip and ratings system a chance to 
work. It is time to honor the commitment that was made in 1997--to 
allow this system to proceed unimpeded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alabama.
  Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Chair.
  Mr. President, I am intrigued by the Hollings amendment.
  Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?
  Mr. SESSIONS. I will.
  Mr. HATCH. We said that after you finished we would go to Senator 
Hollings. With Senator Hollings' permission, I will yield 5 minutes, if 
I have it, or the remainder of my time, to the distinguished Senator 
from Montana, and then Senator Hollings.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, this fits along with the general view of 
mine. We are both lawyers, and Senator Hollings is a better lawyer than 
I, but I think we have made television prime time movies too much a 
matter of first amendment freedoms, and not enough of a matter of 
common sense. To say that you have to meet certain standards during 
certain hours of the day when our children may be impacted by that does 
not, in a significant way, prohibit a person from exercising what we 
generally understood to be free speech when we founded this country. 
Speech was generally understood, at the most fundamental level, as a 
communication about ideas and issues, and that you would be able to 
articulate and defend and promote your issues. It did not mean--and I 
don't think the Founding Fathers contemplated--that every form of video 
of vicious murder or sexual relations or obscenity could be published 
in print and in our homes.
  In fact, we have laws all over America that flatly prohibit certain 
degrees of obscenity. Indecency cannot be prohibited, but things that 
are determined as a matter of law to be obscene are flatly prohibited 
anywhere in America. So, therefore, they say that on the public 
airwaves, which we license people to use, they have to be committed to 
the public service. They have to give so many hours of public service 
advertisements, and we monitor the stations to make sure that they do 
so. To say there is no Government agency that can say certain things 
can't be shown during limited periods of time, to me, is strange law. I 
don't think it is quite right.
  In addition, I know a lot of people who have spoken on the floor here 
today--and over the last several days, are worried. Also, the President 
has spoken about his concern that in the afterschool hours children are 
not supervised. Many children have parents who work swing shifts or 
parents who have to be out in the yard or doing other things while they 
are inside watching TV, and they may not have a V-chip yet. Do we have 
no responsibility to those children? Is it sufficient to just say it is 
their parents' fault?
  Some say if you are a parent, you can control whatever your children 
watch. Those of us who are parents know that is not precisely accurate. 
We can work at it hard, and if you are a parent who is home most of the 
time, you can do a fairly good job. But even then a determined young 
person can pretty well watch what they want. The point is, the showing 
of any one violent scene is not going to cause a normal child to become 
a murderer. The point is, what happens if every night kids who maybe 
are not healthy are seeing on their television images of violence--and 
in years gone by, they have gotten more graphic--and at the same time 
they get in their car and they play an audio or CD of Marilyn Manson, 
who has extremely violent lyrics, or they turn on the computer and play 
computer games. I was looking at one and the pointer was a chopped-off 
hand with blood dripping off it. That is humorous to some degree, but 
where you have it constantly, it is a problem.
  First of all, in my wrestling with the Hollings amendment, is it 
appropriate for the Government to do so? The FCC does all kinds of 
other limitations on programming. Is it appropriate for them to analyze 
the content for violence? I have had my staff do some research of the 
law on it.
  First of all, my general opinion is that the current state of the law 
is too restrictive on the ability of the Government to contain what is 
shown in the homes of America. I think it is too restrictive. I don't 
think the Constitution does that. But the current state of the law, I 
believe, is too restrictive, and these are some of the things I have 
discovered.
  Under the Hollings amendment, we would perhaps be considered to be 
pushing the envelope a little bit. But I am not sure that we would 
because it would prohibit distribution of violent video programming 
during hours when children are reasonably likely to comprise a 
substantial portion of the audience. It would require the FCC to reach 
a definition of what violent programming is and determine the timeframe 
for it. It would permit the FCC to exempt news and sports programming, 
and it would have penalties for those who violate that.

  The closest law we can find on point is on the FCC's regulation of 
indecent programming, which has survived challenge in the courts. 
Obscene material is the kind of material that is illegal, where the 
Supreme Court has stated that this material can be so obscene and so 
lacking in any merit, that communities in the country can ban it from 
being distributed in their communities. Indecent material is the kind 
of material that is less than obscene. So what do we do about indecent 
material? The FCC defines indecent material--and I am paraphrasing--as 
this: Patently offensive descriptions based on local community 
standards of sexual and excretory functions or organs.
  Government regulation of indecent material is possible, but it has to 
survive a standard of strict scrutiny. The courts are going to look at 
it very strictly to make sure the first amendment is not being 
undermined.
  In Action for Children's Television v. FCC, a 1995 case decided in 
the District of Columbia, the DC court of appeals--which is one step 
from the U.S. Supreme Court--upheld the FCC safe harbor regulation of 
indecent material, provided the regulation was the least restrictive 
means to achieve the Government's compelling interest in protecting 
young people from indecent programming.
  It didn't deal with violence. The original ban on indecent 
programming between 6 a.m. and midnight contained an exception for 
public programmers to broadcast indecent material between 10 p.m. and 
midnight.
  A lot of public broadcasters quit at midnight. So the law is a 
compromise that if you are a public programmer, you can show this 
material at 10 o'clock and you don't have to wait until midnight like 
everybody else.
  The court found that this exception was not narrowly drawn--not the 
most narrowly drawn restriction and mandated that you have this kind of 
law and everybody has the 10 o'clock rule. Some of them can't have 10 
and some have midnight. But it upheld it. The Supreme Court upheld that 
restriction and that rule by the FCC. It was appealed to the U.S. 
Supreme Court, the final arbiter. They affirmed the ruling without 
opinion. They did not hear the case, but they did not overrule, and 
they allowed to stand the opinion of the district court.
  So I think the difference we have here is that we are dealing with 
violence as opposed to what may be defined under the law as indecent.
  I think we are raising a very good point. I am seriously considering 
this amendment. I understand those who have concerns about it. My basic 
inclination is to say that we ought to care about children. We know for 
a fact that many children are at home and unsupervised. We have a 
responsibility and it is not in violation of the first amendment to 
deal with this and have some restrictions on it.
  Thank you, Mr. President.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Montana.
  Mr. BURNS. Mr. President, I hope that Americans will look upon this 
debate. I think it is indicative of how hard and how difficult it is to 
deal with this issue. One cannot paint with a broad brush, whether we 
are talking about firearms or entertainment programming or games, or 
anything else. We cannot paint with a broad brush.

[[Page S5213]]

  We are under the heels of tragedies such as Littleton, CO. We are 
very quick to blame. We are also reluctant to admit our own 
shortcomings in assuming our responsibilities as citizens, as parents, 
as schoolteachers, and as members of a community.
  This particular amendment pretty much says, let no good deed go 
unpunished. It is too broad. We may table this amendment, and it should 
be tabled. But I hope that those who are in the business of 
entertainment and providing programming in its many forms, I hope this 
message gets to downtown Burbank and Hollywood and Vine.
  This basically, if you look at the amendment, is pretty much a 
lawyer's amendment. It says:

       We shall define the term ``hours'' when children are 
     reasonably likely to comprise a substantial portion of the 
     audience, and the term ``violent video programming.''

  I will tell you that argument will go on for just a little more than 
a moon, because we know that long hours of television are experienced 
just after school when they first get home. Then ``prime time,'' we 
would have to define ``prime time'' as somewhere between 8 o'clock and 
midnight.
  It also includes maybe the Internet. You could interpret this to say 
the Internet, because it says in this section the term:

       ``Distribute'' means to send, transmit, retransmit, 
     telecast, broadcast, or cablecast, including by wire, 
     microwave or satellite.

  You can also interpret that as the Internet.
  We have never to this point put restrictions on the Internet. There 
may be a day coming when, if the ISPs and the programmers don't show 
some kind of responsibility, Government will.
  It is almost unenforceable. In fact, it is unenforceable. I have 
never seen a section like this that says if any part of this amendment 
is found unconstitutional, then the remainder stays in. I think again 
that is pretty much full employment for our legal profession.
  The amendment runs counter to the meaning that we had when we all sat 
down and worked out the V-chip. There were some of us who said the V-
chip will probably not work unless we have responsible parents who are 
in charge of the television, basically. We were told at that time that 
the V-chip people were ready to go for it.
  Do you know that the first television to have a V-chip in it--this 
was an agreement 2 years ago, back in July of 1997. Guess what. We have 
yet to see the first television set to have a V-chip in it--2 years 
later. That television won't be on the market until July of this year.
  Let's give it a chance to work, as far as the V-chip is concerned.
  I want to send a strong message to those who will provide 
entertainment. You should get the message right away. There are people 
looking, and there are people willing to take some steps, if they show 
no responsibility at all in programming to our young people.
  I thank the Chair. I thank the floor leader for the time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina is recognized.
  Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, the distinguished Senator from Montana 
is the chairman of our Subcommittee on Communications. He questions 
now: Is the amendment too broad? It sounds to him like a lawyer's 
amendment. But the distinguished Senator did vote for something 
identical in 1995 and in 1997, because he voted for exactly that when 
we reported out the ``lawyer's amendment,'' or however he wants to 
describe it right now. I appreciated his vote at that time. I am sorry 
I didn't get to talk to him this morning when he came in, because I 
think I could have gotten him back around to where he was. So much for 
that.

  My distinguished colleague from California talks about ``Schindler's 
List.'' Heavens above. We said, ``Excessive, gratuitous violence.'' You 
have ``Schindler's List.'' You have ``Civil War.'' You have ``Saving 
Private Ryan.'' It just couldn't apply under this amendment. So let's 
not raise questions like that.
  With respect to pointing the finger at one industry, no. We pointed 
the finger yesterday--almost a majority, but half the Senate, almost--
to the gun industry. We are trying at every angle we possibly can to do 
something rather than to just talk about it, because that is what we 
have been doing with respect to television violence. Now they come, of 
course, with the wonderful putoff, that ``shall the Government 
decide,'' and ``let the parents,'' ``power to the parents,'' and 
everything else like that. Heavens above.
  I haven't seen an amendment yet to repeal the FCC authority over 
indecency. In fact, the decision--going up before the courts, finding 
it to be constitutional--by Judge Edwards, who said violence would be 
even again more appropriately controlled, but he ruled again on the 
authority of the Government, the heavy hand of Government, rather than 
the parent, namely the FCC, to come down and control indecency during 
the family hour that we have today for indecency.
  What this boils down to is to merely extend the family hour for 
indecency, to violence, to television violence. We brought the Attorney 
General of the United States, the Justice Department, and she attested 
to the fact of its constitutionality as well as the outstanding force 
of constitutional law by professors from the various campuses.
  Mr. President, we have had that study. It came out again by the 
voluntary effort of the industry itself back in 1992. We put that one 
in the Record. Then 6 years later, what does Hollywood say?
  I repeat the various letters that we have here, Mr. President. We had 
the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists finding this, 
the Producers Guild of America finding this, the Writers Guild of 
America finding this, the Caucus for Producers, Writers and Directors, 
and the Directors Guild of America--all finding this. When I say 
``finding this,'' I mean that much of TV violence is still glamorized. 
It is trivialized. So we know what the industry does with a study and 
an investigation in the Brownback amendment.
  Mr. President, if we value family values, listen to this one.
  Out in Ohio, a 5-year-old child started a fire that killed his 
younger sister. The mother attributed the fact that he was fascinated 
with fire to the MTV show Beavis & Butt-Head, in which they often set 
things on fire. The show featured two teenagers on rock video burning 
and destroying things. The boy watched one show that had the cartoon 
character saying ``fire is fun.'' From that point on, the boy has been 
playing with fire, the mother said. It goes on to say the mother was 
concerned enough that she took the boy's bedroom door off the hinges so 
she could watch him more closely, the fire chief said.
  Let's give the mothers of America a break. Yes, we can put in the V-
chip; yes, we can do all the little gimmicks. But we know one thing is 
working: They don't shoot 'em up in London schools. They don't shoot 
'em up in European schools. They don't shoot 'em up in Australian 
schools. They have a family hour with respect to television violence. 
It is working.
  In this country, why doesn't the family values crowd have the family 
hour with respect to TV violence?
  Mr. DORGAN. Will the Senator yield?
  Mr. HATCH. I yield 2 minutes to the Senator.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I have listened to this debate. It reminds 
me of the three stages of denial: The fellow says I wasn't there when 
it happened; if I was there, I didn't do it; if I did it, I didn't mean 
it.
  I have listened to the denial on this issue. We finally come to the 
point after three decades of debate, especially in the last 6 or 8 
years, where the denial is to say we can't take a baby step forward on 
this important issue because somebody has reached an agreement 
somewhere with someone else.
  I didn't reach an agreement with anybody. We have a V-chip. I 
introduced the first V-chip bill in the Senate January 31, 1994. We 
have a V-chip in law. But don't anybody stand up here and say that 
because we have a V-chip in law there was some deal someplace with 
somebody that prevents Members from doing what we ought to do now. 
Don't anybody say that, because I was not part of a deal. The Senator 
from South Carolina was not part of a deal, and I daresay that 90 other 
Senators in this Chamber were part of no deal with anybody about these 
issues.
  This is common sense. This makes sense.

[[Page S5214]]

  It seems to me that we ought not have anybody ever come to the floor 
of the Senate again to talk about this issue if Members are not willing 
to take this baby step in the right direction.
  I am pleased to join the Senator from South Carolina in offering this 
amendment today to say we have had a lot of discussion, hundreds of 
studies, a lot of debate. Now we come to the time where we choose. 
Don't make excuses. Don't talk about some deal that doesn't exist for 
most Senators. Vote for this legislation.
  Mr. HOLLINGS. I thank the distinguished Senator for his leadership.
  Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I move to table the amendment, and I ask 
for the yeas and nays.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Fitzgerald). Is there a sufficient second?
  There is a sufficient second.
  The yeas and nays were ordered.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion to 
table amendment No. 328. The yeas and nays have been ordered. The clerk 
will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
  Mr. REID. I announce that the Senator from Hawaii (Mr. Inouye) is 
necessarily absent.
  The result was announced--yeas 60, nays 39, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 114 Leg.]

                                YEAS--60

     Allard
     Baucus
     Bayh
     Bennett
     Boxer
     Breaux
     Brownback
     Bunning
     Burns
     Campbell
     Chafee
     Cleland
     Cochran
     Collins
     Craig
     Crapo
     Daschle
     Dodd
     Domenici
     Enzi
     Feingold
     Fitzgerald
     Frist
     Gorton
     Gramm
     Grams
     Hagel
     Hatch
     Hutchinson
     Inhofe
     Jeffords
     Kennedy
     Kerrey
     Kerry
     Kyl
     Leahy
     Levin
     Lott
     Lugar
     Mack
     McCain
     McConnell
     Moynihan
     Murkowski
     Murray
     Nickles
     Reed
     Robb
     Roberts
     Roth
     Santorum
     Schumer
     Shelby
     Smith (NH)
     Smith (OR)
     Specter
     Thomas
     Thompson
     Torricelli
     Voinovich

                                NAYS--39

     Abraham
     Akaka
     Ashcroft
     Biden
     Bingaman
     Bond
     Bryan
     Byrd
     Conrad
     Coverdell
     DeWine
     Dorgan
     Durbin
     Edwards
     Feinstein
     Graham
     Grassley
     Gregg
     Harkin
     Helms
     Hollings
     Hutchison
     Johnson
     Kohl
     Landrieu
     Lautenberg
     Lieberman
     Lincoln
     Mikulski
     Reid
     Rockefeller
     Sarbanes
     Sessions
     Snowe
     Stevens
     Thurmond
     Warner
     Wellstone
     Wyden

                             NOT VOTING--1

       
     Inouye
       
  The motion was agreed to.
  Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.
  Mr. LEAHY. I move to lay that motion on the table.
  The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.
  Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that following the 
disposition of amendment No. 335, Senator Feingold be recognized for up 
to 8 minutes to make a statement on debate, the Senator from Minnesota 
be recognized for up to 10 minutes, and then Senator Ashcroft be 
recognized to offer an amendment regarding guns, and that there be 45 
minutes equally divided for debate prior to the vote on or in relation 
to the amendment, with no amendments in order to the amendment prior to 
that vote.
  I further ask consent that following the debate, the amendment be 
laid aside and Senator Feinstein be recognized to offer an amendment 
regarding gun control, with the debate limited to 90 minutes and under 
the same parameters outlined above.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Voinovich). Is there objection?
  Mr. LEAHY. Reserving the right to object----
  Mr. HATCH. Let me finish. Following that debate, the Senate proceed 
to vote in the order in which the amendments were offered, with 5 
minutes prior to each vote for explanation.
  Mr. LEAHY. Reserving the right to object, and I will not object, I 
assume then that 5 minutes would be divided in the usual fashion.
  Mr. HATCH. Therefore, for the information of all Senators--do I have 
the unanimous consent?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. HATCH. Therefore, for the information of all Senators, the next 
votes will occur at approximately 3:30 p.m. and approximately 4 p.m. 
today.
  Mr. LEAHY. Unless time is yielded back.
  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, following 
the disposition of those amendments, is it then your intention to move 
to a Hatch-Craig amendment?
  Mr. HATCH. Yes; following that, we intend to move to the Hatch-Craig 
amendment on firearms.
  Mr. LEAHY. That is not part of the unanimous consent request.
  Mr. HATCH. That is not part of the unanimous consent request.
  Mr. McCAIN. I ask unanimous consent that we move to the Hatch-Craig 
amendment immediately following the disposition of those amendments.
  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, at this time I object.
  Mr. McCAIN. Then I object to the unanimous consent request.
  Mr. LEAHY. We already have that.
  Mr. HATCH. Let me ask the Senator----
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The unanimous consent agreement has been 
agreed to, and the Senator from Wisconsin has 8 minutes.
  Mr. HATCH. Would the Senator from Arizona----
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wisconsin has 8 minutes.
  (The remarks of Mr. Feingold pertaining to the introduction of S. 
1035 are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced 
Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
  Mr. WELLSTONE addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota is recognized.

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