WASHINGTON, April 29 (UPI) -- NBC has dropped its longstanding opposition to rating its TV shows based on content, The Hollywood Reporter said Friday.
The paper said the network will add content descriptors to the age-based ratings it has aired at the beginning of its programs since the advent of V-Chip in the mid-1990s. The ratings system was designed in response to the V-Chip provision of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, but NBC declined to rate its programs for violence, sexual content, vulgar language or other considerations -- both out of concern for First Amendment issues and because of fear that viewers would see the ratings as onscreen clutter.
NBC Universal chairman and CEO Bob Wright said in a statement that the change was intended to serve the viewers.
"We particularly want to provide information to parents so that they can judge the appropriateness of programming for their children," he said.
According to The Reporter, the statement is a turnabout from Wright's testimony in Washington in 1997, when he argued that the ratings system would just "add to parents' confusion" and that the content descriptors could be abused by those who would censor TV.
