Friday, December 09, 2005
Ratings Creep
NPR discussed the phenomenae of “Ratings Creep”, a trend in which the MPAA rating of films have changed over the years. For example, a film that would have been considered R in the early 1990s would now garner a PG-13 rating. MPAA President Dan Glickman obfuscates this trend by informing NPR that the motion picture rating is only an initial guidepost, and that responsible parents would then seek further information from the numerous internet sites that screen film content.
Dan truly lives in the myth that all of America is up-to-date on technology. By all estimates, the number of households in the United Sates with internet access is 75%. That means one quarter of the population, 82.5 million, don’t have access to these content-screening sites. Also, he assumes that all internet users know of them or actively would seek them out to be responsible. I think there are quite a few people our there that look to the MPAA as THE authority on what is acceptable in a film. Ratings creep is a fault in the system that is completely correctable and should be adjusted by the MPAA. It’s their responsibility to do so.
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