[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 37 (Monday, September 18, 2000)]
[Pages 2029-2032]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the Community of Westchester County in Scarsdale, New York

September 11, 2000

    Thank you. Patty was really good, wasn't she? [Laughter] She did a 
great job. I want to thank her for being here, for the work she does as 
a parent and the work she does in her day job for our children.
    And thank you Peggy Charren, a long-time friend of Hillary's and 
mine, and of all the children of America. Thank you, Andy Spano, for 
being here. And thank you, our great friend, Nita Lowey. What a terrific 
Representative in Congress she is, and I hope you get a little help. 
Thank you.
    I want to thank Eileen Lehrer and Ellen Lazarus and all the people 
here at the JCC who made us feel so welcome today. I even got to walk 
downstairs and shake hands with some of the children and teachers and 
parents on what I understand is the first day of school--[laughter]--
which makes this quite appropriate.
    This happens to me often--and I'm sure it will more and more now 
that Hillary is in politics as a candidate--but very often I get to 
speak last, and everything that really needs to be said has already been 
said. [Laughter] Everything that needs to be said has been said. But 
what does it all mean? And how can we distill it? So let me just try.
    First of all, this is, in some ways, the newest of issues and, in 
some ways, the oldest of issues. Plato said, thousands of years ago, 
``Those who tell the story, rule society.'' Whenever a young person 
comes to me, interested in politics, wanting to run for office, dreaming 
of public service, and they ask me for advice, I always tell them two 
things: One is, you've got to have some reason to run bigger than 
yourself; and the second is, you have to learn to listen, to hear the 
music of other people's lives, because everybody's got a story.
    Now, that's really what this is about. We live in a culture, and a 
lot of the stories our children have, the stories of their lives, come 
direct from the accumulated experiences and memories that they absorb 
from their parents, their grandparents, their extended family, the 
people of their faith, the people of their school, the people of their 
community.
    And then there's all the stuff they get from a further reach. And 
more and more and more now, over the last 40 to 50 years, with the 
advent of television and then the computers and the video games and 
music video and, frankly, the 24-hour news cycle, and then the explosion 
of cable channels, you can get more and more and more of your story by 
indirection, from third party sources, at all hours of the day and 
night, from all kinds of sources, that parents have less and less direct 
control over.
    Because what this is really about is, what will be the stories that 
shape these children,

[[Page 2030]]

and how will they relate to it? And what specifically does this FTC 
report mean? It's already been mentioned that we've known now for 300 
years, through some 300 studies, I might add--300--this is not something 
that's subject to debate--that regular, persistent exposure of children 
at young ages to indiscriminate violence tends to make them less 
sensitive to the real and human impact of violence in their own lives. 
It changes their story. That's what this is about. It shapes how they 
think about the implications and the impact of what they do and what 
other people do.
    So we started working on this, I guess, Hillary and I did--well, she 
started working on it years ago--but from I think the first time I went 
to Hollywood to talk to people about this was December of 1993, I 
believe. And then we began to work about 5 years ago with the 
entertainment community on a ratings system for television programs and 
on the V-chip. And this year will be the first year, I think, that all 
new televisions have to have the V-chip built in. Before, you had to get 
a little box to go with it.
    And meanwhile, we've been working with the video game industry about 
kind of a ratings system and a little control over access to that. And 
we've done some more things I'll mention in a minute with movies. But 
the whole idea was, in the fight to save public broadcasting, to try to 
encourage more children's and educational programming on all networks, 
the fight to get the TV ratings system and the V-chip and deal with the 
video games and the movies--the whole idea was to try to give parents 
more control over the stories of their children's lives at their 
earliest and most vulnerable points, so that later on, the kids would be 
happier and more full and less anxiety-ridden, and the society would be 
more stable and less violent.
    And it's a very old story. What Plato said a long time ago is still 
true today. So the problem is, this FTC report says that some 
entertainment companies are engaged in marketing practices that if not 
illegal are clearly wrong because they're trying to sell their movies 
and their other products to the very people that they, themselves, say 
shouldn't see them. ``So here's my rating system. Here's what I hope the 
parents will act on, and while the parents aren't looking, I'm going to 
beam this advertising in and hope they'll come anyway.''
    This validates what Hillary has been saying for years. But the real 
issue is, what are we going to do?
    I don't really think that there are a lot of people making these 
movies and video games that hope your kids turn out to be violent. Do 
you? I mean, I don't think that they want your kids to have a twisted 
story and our society to become ever more unstable. This is about the 
economics of the modern media: both the explosion of media outlets, the 
explosion of movies being made, the explosion of video games being made, 
the explosion of television programs being made, a gazillion channels on 
your television at night; the coming integration of all these media 
forces so that some day not too long from now you'll hang a thin little, 
very high-definition screen up on a wall, take it from wall to wall in 
your house, and you'll be able to have the Internet and your video games 
and your television, and, sooner or later, we're going to beam direct in 
movies. You won't even have to wait for the DVD. That's what's all 
happening. And there will be a gazillion options, and it will be 24 
hours a day, and that's where it's going.
    And what happens is--and these people face the same problems here, 
same challenges. All these folks are just giving us news. And what 
happens to them? You know, a very small percentage of these films make 
money directly in the theater. And interestingly enough, the R-rated 
movies, a smaller percentage of them than the G and the PG movies make 
money directly in the theater. So a lot of these movies are made for an 
after market. But they've got to get as much money as they can. We're 
just talking about the movies now. And they turn around and sell the 
movies to television or sell the movies overseas or whatever. But that's 
no help to you. You've got children to raise. You don't care about their 
problems.
    And we're working this out as a society. I'm very worried about it 
for a lot of reasons. It used to be all of the programming that only 
adults should see when we had three networks were on television at 
night, after a certain time. Now everything is on all the

[[Page 2031]]

time, at least somewhere. I don't know when some people sleep at all 
anymore. [Laughter] The whole rhythm and pattern of normal life has been 
affected by this constant barrage of stuff.
    Now, last spring I asked the movie industry to reevaluate the PG 
rating, to make sure that it was meaning something. And I asked them to 
keep guns out of the ads that kids might see. And I asked the theater 
and video owners to enforce more strictly the ratings system.
    Now, I'm glad that the theater owners accepted this challenge, and 
the report shows that they're actually making progress. But according to 
the FTC investigators, underage children still frequently are sold 
tickets for R-rated movies.
    So here's where we are on the specific issue at hand. We know that 
extreme, consistent, persistent exposure to violence of children at 
young ages desensitizes them to the impact of their own behavior and 
others. It disables them from having full feelings about violent 
conduct. We know this. This is not subject to debate.
    We know now that we're making progress with a lot of good people in 
the entertainment industry. They're doing more to rate their shows and 
try to provide other kinds of shows. But we know that a lot of people 
are out there now--we know--today, advertising these very programs to 
the people they say shouldn't see them and that some of the people who 
control children's access in theaters are still letting them in, in a 
very casual way.
    So what do we do? Peggy said we don't want to get into first 
amendment censorship. I agree with that. I think we have to challenge 
and say, the American people, ``I agree with what Hillary said.'' The 
American people will give, I think, the entertainment industry a period 
now to fix this, but something has to be done. You can't make a mockery 
of a system that you say has integrity. They say these ratings systems 
mean something. They can't turn around and advertise to people that 
shouldn't see this stuff. They can fix this. They can fix this. So I 
think it's very important.
    Now, we will know whether they take appropriate action or not 
sometime in the next few months. Sometime in the next few months, I 
won't be President anymore. [Laughter] And I'll just be a citizen like 
the rest of you, and I look forward to that. But that's what makes these 
elections very important. Because one of the major factors--challenges, 
I think, facing this country over the next decade, with all of our 
prosperity, will be how to make it possible for more and more Americans 
to succeed at work and at their most important work, which is raising 
children. It's the most important job any mother or father does, raising 
children. It is society's most important work.
    I don't know how many times I said that when I had an argument with 
my daughter over the last umpty-ump years--[laughter]--``At least I want 
you to know this. I consider you my most important job, even if you 
disagree with me. You've got to understand that.'' This is important, 
what are we going to do?
    Now, that's where these elections are important. You heard Hillary 
talk about; you heard Peggy talk about it. Hillary has been working on 
this stuff for 30 years. You need somebody in the Congress who has a 
lifetime commitment and world-class expertise on these issues, somebody 
who doesn't go around just jumping at the latest headline.
    I was kind of proud of her today. I didn't know exactly what she was 
going to say. She stood up here and said, ``I'm not suggesting we ought 
to have censorship here, but we've got to have mutual responsibility in 
this society, and they have to do something about this. This report says 
that people in the entertainment industry, not all of them but a lot of 
them, are doing things that are wrong, that they acknowledge are wrong. 
We've got to see what happens.''
    You need people like that in the Congress, and especially in the 
Senate because it's such a debating forum for America's hot issues. You 
need someone who understands that all these rating systems don't make a 
lot of sense to a lot of people, and it would be far better if there 
were one, uniform, unambiguous rating system for all forms of 
entertainment to which our children are exposed, something Hillary, I 
think, was the first and maybe the only person to forcefully advocate in 
the entire country.

[[Page 2032]]

    And you need someone who sees in a larger sense that this media 
issue is tied to other issues: the need for gun safety legislation, the 
need for safe and drug-free schools, the need for after-school and 
summer school programs for kids, to give them positive things to do, so 
you won't have to spend all of your time just telling them what not to 
do. There needs to be things for children to do. It's very unproductive 
raising a child if you spend all your time saying no. It is a dead-bang 
loser strategy for any parent if all you have to say is, no. You've got 
to say something, yes. You've got to have something for the kids to say 
yes to, who understands that we need greater support for child care, for 
foster care, for adoptions, for family leave. The reason I think that 
she ought to be New York's Senator is that this media issue is another 
example of a lifetime of commitment to the whole idea of what our common 
responsibilities are for our children and for each other. It really does 
take a village, and that's her whole idea.
    So I ask you to think about it. I want you to go home tonight and 
talk at dinner about this FTC report. I want you to talk to the people 
you work with about it. And instead of just railing against the people 
out there, I want you to think about some of the things that have been 
said here today and what Patty said about what your responsibilities 
are.
    And I want you to think about what kind of person you really want in 
the United States Senate when the chickens come home to roost on the 
whole question of the role of media violence in your children's and your 
grandchildren's lives and gun safety and whether the schools are open 
enough and have the right kind of programs for after-school and summer 
school and whether we're really doing what we need to on family leave 
and foster care and adoption.
    All these issues have to be dealt with together, because I'm telling 
you there is no more important challenge for any society than maximizing 
the chance that good people can succeed at work and at their most 
important work, raising their children. There's nobody better prepared 
to do that than Hillary.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 11:07 a.m. in Henry Kauffman Hall at the 
Jewish Community Center of Mid-Westchester. In his remarks, he referred 
to Patty Cathers, director of program and volunteer services, Child 
Abuse Prevention Services of Roslyn, NY, who introduced the President; 
Peggy Charren, founder, Action for Children's Television; Andrew J. 
Spano, Westchester County executive; Eileen Lehrer, president, and Ellen 
Lazarus, cochair, board of directors, Jewish Community Center of Mid-
Westchester . The President also referred to a September 11 report by 
the Federal Trade Commission entitled ``Marketing Violent Entertainment 
to Children: A Review of Self-Regulation and Industry Practices in the 
Motion Picture, Music Recording & Electronic Game Industries.''