• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, February 6, 2007

Media critic Ken Auletta staged a frontal assault on three executives representing Big Media on Monday night at the opening event of Beyond Primetime, a conference on social responsibility in media hosted by Commonsense Media and the Aspen Institute at the Time Warner Center in Manhattan. Despite Auletta's best efforts, however, the three execs--Brian Roberts, chairman and CEO of Comcast, Geraldine Laybourne, founder and CEO of Oxygen, and Edgar Bronfman Jr., chairman and CEO of Warner Music Group--held the line tenaciously in their discussion of media and parenting. Above all, media companies are no substitute for parents, and the blame for children's failings belongs chiefly to the parents who neglect them.

That's not to say Auletta didn't try. In his opening salvo he asked the panelists whether their companies offered any content they wouldn't want their children to see. He needled them further by naming specific examples of controversial content produced or distributed by the three companies, including Oxygen's "Bad Girls' Club" and Warner's roster of gangster rap.

But he immediately encountered staunch resistance, with all three executives shifting responsibility back to parents--in this case, themselves. Existing methods of parental policing were duly noted. Roberts explained how he and his wife use parental control features on TV and Internet content to block out risqué or violent material. Likewise, Bronfman--father of seven--said his children aren't allowed to listen to any music that's stickered as explicit.

However, it fell to Laybourne to take the offensive. She noted that Oxygen isn't intended for children, while many cable channels are suitable for children. The problem, she suggested, lies with parents who are unable to engage their children in a dialogue to guide their viewing. She recommended that parents watch TV shows with their children "and tell them when 'we don't approve of these values.'"

Roberts affirmed that "there's no conversation" at the national level about the importance of parenting, leaving media companies as scapegoats for societal ills. Then Bronfman tried to roll back Auletta's earlier questions, challenging what he said was a basic premise that "anything controversial shouldn't be aired," conflating parental and corporate responsibility. Bronfman noted that some controversial material, like the lyrics of Tupac Shakur (a Warner artist) later gains respect. Here Laybourne added that even Oxygen's most risqué programming is empowering--for women in the appropriate age group.

Bronfman also argued that eliminating controversial material is simply unrealistic from the perspective of capitalism--"the engine that drives our society." In support of this, Roberts noted the discrepancy in ratings for different episodes of E!'s "True Hollywood Stories": those that end with the subject dead enjoy ratings about twice as high as those on a subject still living. Roberts concluded: "Now yes, that's pathetic. But at the end of the day it's the consumer, parented or not, that decides."

But the apparent sincerity of the panel was undercut somewhat when Auletta turned the target elsewhere, observing: "It's easier to police or have parental guidance for TV--how do you have policing for YouTube?" Now the panel reversed course. Bronfman descried the availability of questionable content, pointing specifically to peer-to-peer social networks as purveyors of questionable material. Likewise, Roberts noted the exponential growth in YouTube--which now takes up 4% of Comcast's bit traffic--and issued a call for regulation by some industry body, if not the government itself. For her part, Laybourne shifted attention from TV to the Internet by describing the difficulty of policing the latter: "It's not getting any better--think about the Internet! It's endless!"