Where New TV Ratings Fail: Inappropriate Ads, Promos

It’s dinner hour and my 5-year-old is watching a rerun of “America’s Funniest Home Videos� while I set the table. Surely this is harmless amusement--a kitten that thinks it’s a duck, a grandpa and his falling-down pants, a 2-year-old impersonating Elvis.

The commercials, however, are hardly family fare. “Tonight on Larry Springer! Cross-dressing men and the women who love them!� Three men, looking as if their underwire bras are starting to pinch, sit next to their defiant mates. “I love him and we wear the same shoe size!� I think I hear one of the women say.

“Mommy? Why is that man wearing a dress?�

Click.

I turn the channel just in time to view the last few seconds of a trailer for “The Relic�--people screaming, something pounding its way through a steel door.

“Mommy? What’s that?� my daughter asks. “Did something get that woman?�

Click, click, click.

Finally, happily, we settle on “Jeopardy!� But first, a commercial break. Before I can reach for the remote control, my daughter and I witness a convenience store clerk as he is shot in the face by an assailant.

“Was that pretend?� my daughter wants to know.

Tragically, it is not. It’s real and is being used as a teaser for the news at 11.

Before the television industry gets too self-congratulatory about its new rating system, it needs to do some serious soul-searching about the way it advertises its later-evening programming.

Even before the new rating system was launched this month, I--like many parents--could usually figure out which programs were and were not kid-appropriate. “Rugrats,� yes. “NYPD Blue,� no. And yet even making the most careful television selection can’t prevent what I’ve come to regard as advertising sniper fire.

This kind of viewing--three seconds of a man and woman having sex, a flash of someone being gunned down in the street, the terrifying last seconds of a person’s life--may be even more pernicious than viewing the program itself, where at least there is some kind of context for the moment at hand. Without a before and after, a troubling image becomes even more difficult for parents and children to discuss.

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Sadly, news programs are the worst offenders. It is impossible to entirely shield children from the world; most parents would not do so even if they could. But it is irresponsible for the media to flash three seconds of their most lurid footage in order to entice viewers to stay up for the 11 o’clock news. For example, after the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing, when there were many questions but few answers, local news programs relied on the most tragic images--that of dead children being pulled from the debris--to keep viewers coming back for more.

And welcome to this week’s nanosecond promo: the circumstances surrounding the slaying of JonBenet Ramsey, the Boulder, Colo., 6-year-old who was found dead in her family’s home. There is no justification for leading a 30-second news spot aired during a kids’ program with the grim finding that she had been found hands and legs bound and with duct tape over her mouth.

This isn’t about networks having freedom of speech. This is about them boosting their ratings. If it were otherwise, news organizations would not feel obliged consistently to air their most lurid footage without regard to their youngest viewers.

At least give parents some logical framework from which to make a viewing decision by grouping promos with appropriate programming. If the network wants to air previews for “NYPD Blue� during a football game, that seems fine. If news organizations want to run through all the tragic details of Nicole Brown Simpson’s death during the daytime dramas, again, OK. But, during an early evening program obviously geared for kids, don’t show surveillance footage of someone being fatally shot.

So at our house it’s come down to PBS and Nickelodeon or books or “The King and I� on video. Either that or it’s me sitting with the remote control pointed at the television at all times so my kids can watch a network TV “family hour� program without fear of being frightened by some way-too-adult image.