An Evaluation of the Federal Communications Commission's 2007 Report on TV Violence

Abstract

At the behest of 39 members of the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Energy and Commerce, in 2007 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released a report that addressed the effects of violent television on children, the constitutionality of various strategies for regulating children's exposure to violent television content, and the viability and benefit of a congressionally developed definition of excessively violent television programming. This review evaluates how well the FCC carried out the tasks assigned to it by Congress, particularly in regards to the FCC's assessment of the social scientific research on the effects of exposure to televised violence.

The author would like to thank Dale Kunkel for the idea for this project.

Notes

1. In 2000, the U.S. Surgeon General commissioned several leading media violence researchers to write a report on the effects of violent media on society. However, the Surgeon General's staff altered the report in so many unacceptable ways that its authors refused to sign the document and ultimately released their findings in Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Anderson et al., 2003).

2. Footnotes were excluded from this analysis.

Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978).