hort clip from the half-hour situation comedy Love and War. The clip was from an episode in which the cast of male and female actors, departing from their usual comedic wit in a restaurant that serves as the show's regular set, engaged in a short slapstick barroom brawl scene. Senator Hollings seemed appalled, strongly suggesting that this type of prime-time "violence" was indefensible. Senator Conrad Burns (R,Mont.), sitting on the same panel, expressed a different view, he thought the scene was funny. The problem is compounded by the fact that virtually everyone concedes that some violence is "good" or "acceptable" simply because it is essential to a story line, necessary to depicting human conflict, or vital to reporting history and showing reality. No one would seriously regulate violence on news or sporting events or movies centered on the Holocaust of the Second World War. Even so,called "objective:" criteria would not help. How many punches or bullets are too many? Does it matter whether the specific program is a serious drama, a situation comedy, or an action/adventure? Or should the "criteria" be applied indiscriminately to all programs as long as they are likely to be viewed by significant numbers of children comprising a certain age group? Many of the legislative proposals that began to surface in 1993 have been justified on the grounds that since Congress can regulate many of the finest creative works, is clearly not the equivalent of indecent material. Any governmental effort to sanitize, channel, or otherwise direct the depiction of violence on television would undoubtedly be so overboard as to have a severe chilling effect on all entertainment programming. The continuing controversy over violence on television has largely been spurred and shaped by members of Congress and not the expert agency on communications. The FCC, in fact, over its long history, has rather steadfastly avoided becoming a national censorship board on...
