From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov Transcript for: Watchdog Report: FCC Oversight of the Children’s Television Act Audio interview by GAO staff with Mark Goldstein, Director, Physical Infrastructure Related GAO Work: GAO-11-659: Children's Television Act: FCC Could Improve Efforts to Oversee Enforcement and Provide Public Information Released on: July 14, 2011 [ Background Music ] [ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and information from the Government Accountability Office. It's July 14, 2011. The Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, is responsible for overseeing federal requirements on children's television programming. These include rules about educational programming and restrictions on advertising created by the Children's Television Act of 1990. A group led by Mark Goldstein, a director in GAO's Physical Infrastructure team, recently reviewed some of the issues around children's programming. GAO's Jeremy Cluchey sat down with Mark to learn more. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] What was the intent of the Children's Television Act? [ Mark Goldstein: ] The Children's Television Act was created in 1990 to try to improve how children's television was shown on television. In fact, there weren't all that many children's television shows before that point in time and there were a lot of concerns in Congress and the general public about advertising and an increase in advertising that was occurring during children's programming. So in 1990 they passed the act, and they tried to seek a way to get better programming for children on television and to create some really strong limits on how much advertising could be shown during children's broadcasts and how much of that advertising could include things in it that maybe people didn't want, such as you can no longer have characters that were in the children's programming actually doing the advertisements and things like that. And so those were some pretty strict limits that they set. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] I expect that the children's programming landscape has changed quite a bit since 1990 when the act went into effect. Can you talk a little bit about how it's changed? [ Mark Goldstein: ] Sure, it's changed in a number of ways. Since 1990, there has been an explosion in the amount of television that's available to all consumers of TV including children, and one of the reasons for that is there have been a lot of more channels. You've also seen a huge increase in the number of people who subscribe to cable television. In 1990, it was only roughly 50 percent of the population in the United States—today it's about 87 percent—and there are a number of channels that are just dedicated to children's television as well. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ]The FCC oversees the Children's Television Act and related rules. How successful has their oversight been to date? [ Mark Goldstein: ] Most of the oversight that comes from the Children's Television Act is done by the broadcast side not the and doesn't really affect the satellite and cable side. And the reason for that is because broadcast stations are licensed by the FCC and so to renew their license they must prove that they are complying with the Children's Television Act. And so what you have is broadcast stations that will self-report, and those violations—there has been 7,000 of them that have been self-reported by the broadcast industry in the last two cycles of license renewals. The FCC does a real limited amount of actual oversight investigation in this area and relies on self-reporting for a number of reasons, including limitations on the amount of resources that they could apply and the fact that there was a lot of self-reporting on the broadcast side, but there does appear to be sort of an unequal approach to this and its something that GAO spent a lot of time looking at and it's one of our recommendations that FCC change the approach that they use to oversight. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] Can you talk a little bit more about that and the other recommendations in the report? [ Mark Goldstein: ] Sure. We made three recommendations, one of them relating to the fact that we do think there needs to be greater oversight, particularly on the cable side, because of the uneven oversight that appears. We also made a recommendation, which came out of the focus groups we had. We held a number of focus groups in other, in cities across the United States. Our focus groups did show that parents were pretty confused about what constitutes children's educational programming. And so one of the other recommendations we made was that there be the development of some voluntary standards that FCC, working with various stakeholders and children and parents groups, education groups, try to develop some voluntary standards that could be used. And the final recommendation also came out of our focus groups, which shows that parents were sort of confused; many of them didn't know that there was even a children's television act. FCC does run a Web site. There are other programming guides out there, but we found that the information was either limited or it was very difficult to find the Web site. So our third recommendation focuses on ways that FCC can work with stakeholders to try to improve information that's out there to parents into groups that are focusing on this issue. [ Background Music ] [ Narrator: ] To learn more, visit GAO's Web site at GAO.gov and be sure to tune in to the next edition of GAO's Watchdog Report for more from the congressional watchdog, the Government Accountability Office.