WASHINGTON, DC — Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr told Breitbart News at a press conference on Wednesday that parents are increasingly concerned about transgender content in children’s television as the agency considers updating television ratings.
Breitbart News reported about how the FCC Media Bureau is seeking comment on if the agency should update television ratings to warn parents about children’s programs that discuss “gender identity” and other controversial topics.
The agency has said that it has “significant concerns” with how the ratings system operates, with a lot of content that is meant for adults now being rated as appropriate for children.
When asked about the feedback the agency has received, Carr described that the ratings system was first created at a time when there was a lot of “violent programming.”
He told Breitbart News, “If you go back, Congress passed a law because they wanted parents to be informed about the types of TV programming that their children get. And, at the time there was a lot of focus on violent programming, but the rating system was designed to cover a lot of different issues that parents care about, and increasingly there had been concern raised about some of the transgender content that has been put in children’s television programming.”
He added, “So, one of the ideas that’s been raised is, ‘Should the TV ratings board start to include labels that identify that type of programming and children’s programming, pursuant to the law and the framework that Congress passed?’”
“I think even people that are on different sides of issues as a general matter, I think they all agree fundamentally parents should be informed and parents should make the decision, not the government for them, but few parents have the information that they need to truly make those informed decisions, and that’s what this is ultimately about. It’s parents in light of the challenges that they face today in terms of deciphering what types of programs are okay for their children in their view,” he said.
The FCC also passed items addressing illegal robocall scams, reducing unnecessary regulatory burdens, modernizing the Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS), and launching a “high-cost” program initiative to ensure that Americans in rural areas have access to next-generation services.