SPEECH BY REED E. HUNDT CHAIRMAN FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION CHILDREN NOW ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON CHILDREN AND THE MEDIA (AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY) MAY 1, 1996 "NOW WE'RE FOR CHILDREN" As Chairman of the FCC, I probably have the best job in the public service that you don't have to get elected to. To a degree any job is dependent on what others let you make of it. I was giving a speech to a group of teachers several months ago about -- what else -- children's television. At the end a teacher stood up and said to me, "Look, I know the government can't censor TV. But just for a little while why don't we just let you control what's on TV." I thanked her for her confidence in my judgment. She replied, "Oh I don't know anything about your judgment. I just don't think you can do worse than the people who run TV now." The truth is I probably could do worse, because in fact there is some fine material on TV today. I'm thinking particularly of some of the successful prime time entertainment on broadcast TV, and the many fascinating niche programs of cable. My latest personal favorite is the Comedy Channel's show Dr. Katz, a kind of cross between the Simpsons and Bob Newhart. My wife is a psychologist who practices under her maiden name, and therefore is Dr. Elizabeth Katz. I've told her that cable made this show to show respect for me. I think she believes me. She thinks I think she believes me, but she thinks I'm delusional. I know she thinks that, but I think she also somewhat thinks she might be wrong. Being married to a psychologist is good preparation for being an FCC commissioner. Being a psychologist would be even better. So I don't think TV is still a vast wasteland. But as my friend and great predecessor Newt Minow described so well in his recent book, we are clearly wasting the vast land of TV's potential. In the 50 year history of TV we have barely skimmed the surface of TV's promise to teach, enlighten, bring together, and raise our children. Yet most people treat the subject of TV's impact on children as being like the weather: you can talk about it but you can't do anything about it. Fortunately Children Now exists. This wonderful group knows that we can radically improve the impact of TV on our children. And I believe this group of advertisers, industry representatives, academics, activists, and willing volunteers has the most collective knowledge, energy and acumen ever brought together in one room to address directly the ways and means of improving children's TV, now. It's an honor to speak to you. I want to begin by telling you a story. Ronald Reagan used to say about some of the familiar jokes he told so well, "If you've already heard this, just be polite and pretend you haven't." The story I'm going to tell you haven't just heard, you've lived. And you can't pretend you haven't. It goes like this, someone comes in your office...or you walk into your own office...they say...or maybe you say....I'd like to sponsor, or promote, or produce Shakespeare or science or Auden or art in the terms and forms of today's media so that learning and thought and appreciation can come into the lives of adults and children all over the country. You've had this thought or this dialogue or this debate hundreds of times. The form and the words vary from occasion to occasion but the theme is continuous. And the response..from you or your colleague or your boss or your staff ...is direct or wry or blunt or elliptical. But it boils down to this. If you put Shakespeare on Channel 4, then Channel 7 will do Mr. Ed and Channel 9 will do Mr. Ed on Endomorphins and Channel 5 will do Mr. Ed on Power Endomorphins, and pretty soon we're flatlining in the Neilsen's. So Shakespeare or science or Auden or art doesn't get on. Now some years you get lucky. It turns out that you can't do Auden but you can do Austin. Who knew? The only thing predictable about the Austin movies is that the writer didn't get cut in on the grosses. And notwithstanding the occasional Austin frenzy, or the E. M. Forster boomlet of a few years earlier, the prime directive of TV in our time is that the bad drives out the good. Not always, but usually. The reason is not hard to find. One of my dearest friends is the son of a leading businessman involved in sponsoring many shows in the earliest days of television. As a child my friend asked his father, do you sponsor shows that you think ought to be on TV? The father said, "we're not that rich." In other words, the search for audiences by advertisers is a search for money in an intensely competitive world. It's a commonplace view that these audiences don't want quality shows. Now if that is true, then it follows that you can only make money by advertising on poor quality shows. Incidentally, I don't think making money is a bad thing. Samuel Johnson said that there are few things a person can do that is more innocent than making money. Yet isn't it frustrating to know that advertising supports a great many kids shows that most of us really don't want our kids to watch. And advertising supports hardly any truly educational or family-friendly kids shows. I suspect we all agree with these statements. So when we talk about promoting quality children's programming, and especially truly educational programming, we are talking about how to reverse a fundamental law of TV science: How to get the good to drive out the bad instead of the way things normally work. Some people say that we shouldn't worry about this. The v-chip will shield our kids from the bad. Well, the v-chip will be very important. But its value is in giving parents the ability to choose which shows their children watch. They also need something positive to choose. They need a host of good programming so that when their kids -- inevitably -- sit down to watch television, that time will be spent reinforcing the lessons taught by the parents and the teachers -- not undermining those lessons. This is what Congressman Ed Markey and over 100 Congressmen and Senators are asking for in the letter they have written to the FCC. That is what Senator Lieberman and others are looking for when they strive to bring back the Family Hour. That is what the President asked broadcasters to deliver and what the Vice President discussed Monday at the National Cable Television convention. Let's call this topsy-turvy, anti-matter, looking glass world scenario number two. In this scenario number two, we would all act on John Dewey's famous injunction that we should imagine the education we would like our own children to have, and then make sure all children have just that. And so preschool children would learn to read from several different educational TV shows, some in English and some in other languages. They would get basic science training and the rudiments of addition over the air. When they got to school, teachers would talk about shows that supplemented classroom work; producers would share plots and themes with educators to make a partnership of learning. Because children of different ages can best be reached by very distinctive, individualized programs, shows would be carefully targeted to age groups and described as such. Networks would compete to teach children well. An education Emmy would be a prized award, sought after by the best of the business. Being associated with high quality educational shows would be desirable from the perspective of every major advertiser. In the evening parents would want to sit down with their kids to watch family friendly shows together. Today the selection too often splits families into separate rooms. Is this upside down world impossible? Everybody says so. In history, especially American history, the impossible is impossible until some inventor or some idea or some force makes it inevitable. And then the inevitable becomes a commonplace. Here are some of the impossibles that became inevitable in America in my lifetime: A chicken in every pot. A car in every garage. A TV in every home. The end of infectious childhood diseases. Increases in auto safety. The end of the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union. The federal deficit declining four years in a row, as it has from 1993 through 1996.. Magic Johnson playing basketball again. A personal, laptop computer. Sending a letter by the push of a button anywhere in the world, also called E-mail. and Seinfeld. How can we seriously think that scenario number 2 is truly impossible? That creating a world of high quality educational TV for children of all ages and backgrounds is impossible. Of course it is inevitable. Seinfeld, when it was invented, had a possible audience confined between the Hudson River and Central Park. Now it is a fixture in 30 million homes. The people in this audience can make the impossible sale. And who here wouldn't want their products identified with the Sesame Street and Barney of the 21st century. What would be wrong with Pampers Parents Hour or Huggies Kids Hour? Joseph Bensman, an advertising executive who became a sociologist, wrote a book called Dollars and Sense some years ago. In it, he said that advertising "takes the world as it is and makes it more so." Today's world is a world of choices. To make it more so -- to intensify these choices and to dramatize their selection -- is the job of advertising. The challenge of this job, according to Rosser Reeves in 'Reality and Advertising,' is this: a client puts two identical silver dollars on the table and says, mine is the one on the left, tell me why it's better than the other? If advertising can do that, how can it be that advertising cannot make kids choose family friendly TV? And yet we all hear that familiar refrain. People don't want education or quality. Advertisers can only make money by giving people what they want. Therefore advertisers can't support quality -- unless they are going into a purely eleemosynary line of endeavor. I wonder about the accuracy of the premise that people do not want education or quality from TV. Indeed, no one seems to know how big the audience for quality children's' shows may really be. What we do know is that by providing quality children's programming Discovery Channel recently made ratings history by gaining 57% of the children's viewing audience. Numbers like that suggest the impossible is on the verge of inevitability. I have invited Neilsen's CEO to come and talk to us about the possibility that children are undercounted in the TV audience. What if it turned out to be the case that children are already watching quality educational shows. Sounds impossible? It's probably inevitably true. Of course, we have to agree that advertisers give people what they want. But first advertising persuades them to want it. Not too long ago was there anyone saying they wanted personal computers? I was there in the pre-Gates world, reading books and watching foreign language films. I don't remember anyone saying they wanted a personal computer. Apple and Microsoft persuaded us. All the great commercial successes of American business history reflect an underlying vision that people will want something they didn't then have and didn't necessarily ask for. These were the visions of Edison, Ford, Packard. These visionaries were leaders as servants. They made money as a byproduct of their service to people. Edison said that he would make electric light so cheap that only the rich could afford candles. The cheaper he made electricity, the richer he got. Don't you want to make education and quality TV available to all Americans for free over the air? Don't you want scenario no. 2 to be true? Imagine education for free so that only the rich could afford to do without it: that's a vision. You may have to persuade people they want this product. This is a two step process. First, as Commissioner Ness has said, all you have to do is "make a conscious decision to support high-quality educational and informational programming." Second, be as smart about supporting this programming as you already are smart about creating audiences for what we're calling scenario number 1 programming. Charles Revson said, you remember, that his company didn't sell perfume, it sold dreams. I don't imagine that you will sell only a particular show; you will sell learning. Sure you will need new ideas. And, notwithstanding the occasional Netscape, it takes time for new ideas to take off. Even the Internet is in fact more than 30 years old. So if we haven't made much progress yet in figuring out how to use the media to teach, don't despair. We may not need much more time. Breakthroughs beckon. Not far from here George Lucas has some brilliant projects underway that may well provide the breakthrough concepts. Just think of the founders of the great companies represented in this audience -- their counterparts at this very moment could be, should be, probably are, working on information age products. These could well be ways to teach that break all known constraints on learning. Advertisers could find those ways and support them. That would not be impossible. So what role does the government have? As a public official my job is to be the advocate of the people. I received 20,000 letters and e-mails from people urging more educational TV. One wrote: We want more educational TV. You know it's the right thing. You're the government. Just do it. Well, course government can't make the shows. And it can't make you support the shows. Yet Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government was to do what was worth doing but what none of us could do so well acting alone. So what would you say we should do with the power of collective action that is the purpose of good government? What would anyone here do if you had my job? You are among the most educated, wealthy, and privileged people in what Vladimir Nabokov called our "wise and quiet" country. I honor your experiences and your wisdom. What would you do? My own thought is this. Government can provide, for the benefit of all, certain structures that can prime the pump, jumpstart a process, kickstart some initiatives. Three hours of educational TV a week for broadcast licensees has been called by the New York Times' Frank Rich a "pathetic" number. It is very very small, but it is important in itself and as a symbol of the ways TV ought to be. But it is something. And in those three hours - - which ought to be after 7 am and before 10 pm, and ought to be advertised in advance, and ought to be truly educational in the opinion of respected academics not on industry payrolls - - there would be a chance for advertisers, writers, producers and directors to do the impossible. You could invent the shows that would teach millions of children. Making that impossibility an inevitability and then a commonplace would be the act of genius. The three hours would be like giving Edison the acres at Menlo Park where he could do his inventing. Three hours is not an act of genius, but without it where else do we start? I think the three hours is in a way a call to greatness. The greatness is that great results in education that could come from truly significant support for high quality efforts to teach. The greatness lies in the discovery that the impact of TV on kids can be reinvented to be wholly new and better. I'm not suggesting that teaching is easy. I was a teacher. I wasn't that good. It was a lot easier to give it up and go to law school. But two million teachers every day face the challenge of teaching and I know you could back them up with a few million dollars a year to underwrite quality teaching media. I'm not suggesting that raising kids is easy. My wife and I have three children, and we know something about the challenges of parenthood. But I do believe TV, and everyone in this audience, can help us all raise the next generation. I'd like to see broadcasters come to Washington not to be woodshedded or jawboned or placed in the alleged congregation before the erstwhile bully pulpit to be lectured about how much educational TV they should provide in return for their free licenses. I'd like to see them come to Washington for awards as teachers of the year. It's impossible with today's state of mind; with the attitudes you can create in this country -- because that's what advertising does -- it will be inevitable tomorrow. So what's your role? Plainly it's make the world anew: to give us the mirror of what we have now: to deliver what I called scenario number two. During this conference you have every chance to draw the maps of this new world. There has never been a gathering as powerful and as powerfully committed as this one. I'm thrilled to think about what you will agree to do. Perhaps you'll: -- form partnerships between advertisers and production companies to put real resources into developing high quality kids' shows; -- act as a group to get networks and affiliates to guarantee clearance at appropriate hours for your quality shows; -- invent product tie-ins and other merchandising initiatives that will support quality TV; -- volunteer to expand specific sponsoring of shows you want your own children to watch; -- set aside quantifiable amounts of advertising dollars to underwrite educational shows; -- develop ethical guidelines for kids shows. With these suggestions or the better ones you will think of, you are going to make sure that the TV world is turned upside down. You are going to reverse the fundamental law of TV so that the good will drive out the bad and our scenario number two will at last come true. I know that if any of your ideas seem impossible, then you'll figure out how to make them inevitable. And in the seasons ahead, after your successes have been welcomed in millions of TV homes, I see children going to you -- as I told you my friend went to his father many decades ago -- and asking, do you sponsor television that you think children ought to see? And you will say, we didn't use to, but now we do. Fortunately we were rich enough in ideas and rich enough in heart to figure out how to make that happen. So in advance let me say, for the public and for our children and simply for myself, thank you. -FCC-