White House Pushes for TV Ratings Agreement

WASHINGTON —  Looking to resolve the lingering dispute that has pit the television networks and Hollywood against parents’ groups, the White House is aiming to convene a meeting this week to finalize a new rating system for TV programs, administration officials said Saturday.

Administration officials hope the prospect of a White House meeting will encourage the two sides to reach a final agreement on revising the networks’ voluntary rating system, which many parents groups have condemned as too vague since its introduction in January.

One senior White House official said the administration hoped to convene the meeting sometime toward the end of this week, though the date could slip into next week.

“Like any deal, it’s never over until it is over,” the official said. “We would obviously like to be able to announce an agreement on some modification [of the ratings] that would make the children’s advocates happy.”

The White House’s plan to organize the meeting was first reported in Daily Variety.

The networks agreed to rate their programs at an earlier White House meeting with President Clinton, who had pushed for ratings that parents could use, in concert with the V-chip, to block programming they consider objectionable for their children. The networks assigned the task of devising the ratings to Jack Valenti, the chief lobbyist for the motion picture industry, who produced an age-based system similar to the one used to classify movies.

But the plan immediately came under intense fire from parents’ groups and many in Congress, who insisted that the television rating system should also provide more detailed information about violence and sexual content in programming--as several cable networks already do.

Though Clinton initially said the Valenti plan should be allowed a testing period before revisions, and Valenti staunchly resisted change, the networks rapidly lost political support in Congress--particularly when they provided “PG” ratings to some particularly racy programs.

With Congress threatening to legislate its own content-based rating system, most of the major networks have now agreed to revise the system to provide designations for sex, violence and adult language. But sources say NBC continues to resist the change.

In the last week, Vice President Al Gore has met privately with both Valenti and representatives of parents’ groups, hoping to broker an agreement.