Ron Wyden: “as the session winds down this year, I wanted to take a few minutes and bring to the attention of the Senate a new…”

“as the session winds down this year, I wanted to take a few minutes and bring to the attention of the Senate a new development that I think will be of great interest to millions of parents and families across the country. As the distinguished President of the Senate knows from our service in the other body, parents are greatly concerned that their children are bombarded every day with obscene, indecent, profane, and violent entertainment on television. Parents come up to us as legislators and say: What are you going to do to stop this trash? What are you going to do to keep indecent programming away from our children's eyes and ears? Of course, we all wish for an ideal world where parents would take the most direct action, which is simply to turn the television set off. That is something that can be done without any Government role. But with parents working--and very often both parents working two jobs each to try to make ends meet--that is not always possible. So as I began to look at how to solve the indecency problem, I asked what could the Government do in this area to better protect our kids from indecent programming on television? I also asked how to do it in a way without a big government bureaucracy program, a one-size-fits-all approach or where the Federal Government would regulate the actual content of the programs on our television sets.…”