    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
    [July 10, 1995]
    [Pages 1065-1067]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 1065]]

    Remarks at the Opening of Session I of the Family Re-Union IV Conference
    in Nashville, Tennessee
    July 10, 1995

        Thank you very much. I thought it might be nice to stop by here
    after having done my primary duty, which was delivering the soup to Mrs.
    Gore. [Laughter] I'm delighted to be here, Governor, Mayor, Senator,
    Members of Congress. To Representative Purcell and the other
    distinguished members of the Tennessee Legislature who are here, Dr.
    Erickson, and to all of you, let me say that I came here primarily to
    listen. And I find that I always learn a lot more when I'm listening
    than when I'm talking, so I will be quite brief.
        I want to say a few things, however. First, I want to thank Al and
    Tipper Gore for their lifetime of devotion not only to their family but
    to the families of this State and this Nation, as manifested by this
    Family Re-union, the fourth such one, something they have done in a
    careful and sustained way. It's already been mentioned twice that Tipper
    has worked on the whole issue that we're here to discuss today for many,
    many years, never in the context of politics but always in the context
    of what's good for families and what we can do to move the ball forward
    for our children and for our future. And I think this country owes them
    a great debt of gratitude. And I'm glad to be here.
        Secondly, I'd just like to frame this issue as it appears to me as
    President and as a parent. I gave a speech at Georgetown a few days ago
    in which I pointed out that the world in which I grew up, the world
    after World War II, was basically shaped by two great ideas: the middle
    class dream, that if you work hard you'll get ahead and your kids can do
    better than you did; and middle class values, that of family and
    community and responsibility and trustworthiness, and that both of those
    things were at some considerable risk today as we move out of the cold
    war into the global economy and the whole way we live and work is
    subject to sweeping challenge.
        The family is the focus of both middle class dreams and middle class
    values, for it is the center around which we organize childrearing--our
    country's most important responsibility--and work. And how we work
    determines how we live and what will become of us over the long run.
        We have seen enormous changes in both work and childrearing in the
    last several years. We know now that a much higher percentage of our
    children live in poverty, particularly in the last 10 years, even as we
    have a percentage of elderly people in poverty going below that of the
    general population for the first time in history in the last 10 years, a
    considerable achievement of which we ought to be proud as a country. But
    still, our children are becoming more and more poor.
        We know that a higher percentage of our children are being born out
    of wedlock. What you may not know, but is worth noting, is that the
    number of children being born out of wedlock is more or less constant
    for the last few years. So we not only have too many children being born
    out of wedlock, we have more and more young couples where both of them
    are working and having careers who are deferring child bearing and, in
    many cases, not having children at all. I would argue that is also a
    very troubling thing in our country--the people in the best position to
    build strong families and bring up kids in a good way deciding not to do
    so.
        We know that most children live in families where, whether they have
    one parent or two parents in the home, whoever their parents are in the
    home are also working. We know that we do less for child care and for
    supervised care for children as a society than any other advanced
    country in the world.
        We know, too, that most of our parents for the last 20 years have
    been working a longer work week for the same or lower wages, so that
    while Representative Purcell here complimented the Governor on his
    budget because it maintained a commitment to children in terms of public
    investment, you could make a compelling argument that the private
    investment in children has been going down because most families have
    both less time and less money to spend on their children.
        And we know that as parents spend less time with their children, by
    definition the children

    [[Page 1066]]

    are spending more time with someone or something else, so that the media
    has not only exploded in its ramifications in our lives but also has
    more access to more of our children's time than would have been the case
    20 years ago if all these technological developments had occurred when
    the family and our economy were in a different place. And I think we
    have to look at all these issues in that context.
        Now, it's commonplace to say that most of us believe that there's
    too much indiscriminate violence, too much indiscriminate sex, and too
    much sort of callous degradation of women and sometimes of other people
    in various parts of our media today. I believe that the question is, so
    what? What we ought to be talking about today is, so what are we all
    going to do about that? Because our ability to change things, I think,
    consists most importantly in our ability to affirmative steps.
        At this talk at Georgetown, I made a commitment that I would try to
    set an example for what I thought our political leaders ought to be
    doing. We ought to have more conversation and less combat. When we
    criticize, we ought to offer an alternative. We ought to be thinking
    about the long run; these trends that we're dealing with have been
    developing over quite a long while now. And we ought to celebrate what
    is good as well as condemn what we don't like. And I think if we do
    those four things, then we will be able to make good decisions.
        So let me just make two specific suggestions, and then I'd like to
    get on with listening to other people. First of all, in the spirit of
    alternatives and celebrating what is good, I'm for balancing the budget,
    but I'm against getting rid of public television or dramatically cutting
    it. In our family this is known as the ``Leave Big Bird alone''
    campaign. [Laughter] I say that because we are going to have to cut a
    bunch of stuff, folks, and we are going to have to cut a lot of things.
    The budget would be in balance today but for the interest we're paying
    on the debt run up between 1981 and 1993. Next year, interest on the
    debt will exceed the defense budget. This is a big problem for our
    families, their incomes, their living standards, their future.
        But consider this. Public TV gives, on average, 6 hours of
    educational programming a day. Sometimes the networks have as little as
    a half an hour a week. Public television goes to 98 percent of our
    homes. Forty percent of our people don't have access to cable channels
    like the Learning Channel or A&E. Fourteen percent, only 14 percent of
    overall public television channel funding comes from Federal money, but
    often times in rural places, like Senator Conrad's North Dakota, over
    half of the money comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
    Sixty percent of the viewers have family incomes below $40,000. It costs
    you a $1.09 a year, per citizen, to fund it. And for every dollar public
    television and radio get from the Government, they raise $5 or $6 from
    the private sector. So I think that's my first suggestion.
        My second suggestion relates to the presence of Senator Conrad here.
    If we don't believe in censorship, and we do want to tell parents that
    they have a responsibility, that television, to use Reverend Jackson's
    phrase that the Vice President mentioned, may be the third parent, but
    it can't be the first or the second, and that's up to the parents--if we
    want to say that, but we know we live in a country where most kids live
    in families where there's one or two parents there working and where we
    have less comprehensive child care than any other advanced country in
    the world, the question is how can we get beyond telling parents to do
    something that they physically cannot do for several hours a day unless
    they literally do want to be a home without television or monitor their
    kids in some other way?
        There is one technological fix now being debated in the Congress
    which I think is very important. It's a little simple thing; I think
    it's a very big deal. In the telecommunications bill, Senator Conrad
    offered an amendment which ultimately passed with almost three-quarters
    of the Senate voting for it. So it's a bipartisan proposal that would
    permit a so-called V-chip to be put in televisions with cables which
    would allow parents to decide which--not only which channels their
    children could not watch but within channels, to block certain
    programming.
        This is not censorship; this is parental responsibility. This is
    giving parents the same access to technology that is coming into your
    home to all the people who live there, who turn it on. So I would say
    when that telecommunications bill is ultimately sent to the President's
    desk, put the V-chip in it and empower the parents who have to work to
    do their part to be responsible with media. Those are two specific
    suggestions that I hope will move this debate forward.

    [[Page 1067]]

        Having said what I meant to say, I would like to now go on, Mr. Vice
    President, to hear the people who really know something about this. I
    want to thank you all for your care and concern. And let me echo
    something the Governor said: There is a huge consensus in this country
    today that we need to do something that is responsible, that is
    constructive, that strengthens our families and gives our kids a better
    future, and that celebrates the fact that this is the media center of
    the world. And we want it to be that way 10, 20, 50 years from now. But
    we also want to be that way in a country that is less violent, that has
    a more wholesome environment for our children to grow up in, where our
    children are strong and taking advantage of the dominant position the
    United States enjoys in the world media.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at approximately 9:15 a.m. in Polk Theater at
    the Tennessee Performing Arts Center to participants in Family Re-Union
    IV: The Family and the Media. In his remarks, he referred to the Vice
    President's mother, Pauline Gore; Gov. Don Sundquist of Tennessee; Mayor
    Philip Bredesen of Nashville, TN; and Bill Purcell and Marty Erickson,
    cohosts of the conference.