Former Sen. Chris Dodd chairs the Motion Picture Association of America. Hollywood's take on W.H. gun summit

Film, TV and cable sector lobbyists met with Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday night to discuss efforts to curb gun violence, but it was unclear what more Washington could do to force the entertainment industry to temper the blood and guts.

The 2 ½-hour meeting included presentations from companies and trade associations about how they already self-regulate or provide parents the tools to protect children from violent or racy content — such as voluntary ratings systems for movies and TV shows.


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“The entertainment community appreciates being included in the dialogue around the Administration’s efforts to confront the complex challenge of gun violence in America,” the attendees said in a joint statement late Thursday. “This industry has a longstanding commitment to provide parents the tools necessary to make the right viewing decisions for their families. We welcome the opportunity to share that history and look forward to doing our part to seek meaningful solutions.”

Signing on to the statement were representatives of the Directors Guild of America, Independent Film & Television Alliance, Motion Picture Association of America, National Association of Broadcasters, National Association of Theatre Owners, and National Cable & Telecommunications Association.

The meeting had a much different feeling than the one earlier in the day with the NRA, a source said on background. Biden, who is heading the White House Task Force on Gun Violence, and former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who chairs the Motion Picture Association of America, go way back and were friendly, the source said, adding that Biden assured the industry that there was no effort afoot to trample on First Amendment rights.

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"As an industry we've tried to help, and we'll continue to, and the [participants] tonight talked about taking a look at what new technology is available to prevent kids from consuming adult media," said the source, who was not at the meeting but briefed. "There's a sense, though, that the Internet industry will need to help, too, since that's how so many kids see these things."

Biden has a meeting scheduled for Friday at 2:15 p.m. with representatives from the video-gaming community, including Entertainment Software Association CEO Mike Gallagher, an executive from the retailer GameStop and researchers who study the effects on young kids of video game violence, according to sources.

The entertainment industry — and first-person shooter games in particular — have come under scrutiny by the likes of the National Rifle Association for sharing the blame for the rash of mass shootings that have gripped the nation, such as the massacre of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Conn.

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The federal government’s best chance to clamp down on depictions of violence in the entertainment industry comes from the bully pulpit as any attempt to regulate mayhem on both the big and small screen faces a high bar.

“What Vice President Biden can do is talk to the industry and see if he can get some voluntary restrictions; there’s nothing wrong with industry self-regulation,” said Robert Richards, a Penn State professor and director of the Pennsylvania Center for the First Amendment. “But turning this into any type of legislation by Congress, you’re going down the wrong path.”

It’s unclear what the Obama Administration wants to do, but on Thursday Biden said it would take an effort from everyone to curb violence.

“We realize this requires all the stakeholders to give us their best ideas to what is, as I said at the outset, a complicated problem,” he said, according to a pool report earlier in the day. “There is no single answer.”.

Yet sources told POLITICO the industry only learned of the meeting two days ago, so executives arrived with briefing books full of information to describe for Biden's group what they presently do to protect children and alert adults to violent content.

"To us, this is going to be an informational discussion," a source said late Thursday afternoon. "We are looking forward to hearing from the vice president as to what he's looking at and what suggestions he has."

Hollywood films were censored for decades under the Hays Code, a voluntary set of industry guidelines, and barred from containing profanity, nudity or gruesome content. That changed in the 1960s when the late Jack Valenti , head of the Motion Picture Association of America, invented the MPAA ratings system that is used by U.S. studios and theaters today.

While the ratings are ubiquitous, there is no requirement that a filmmaker submit a motion picture to the ratings board.

Similar initiatives followed in the video gaming industry, but concern has continued particularly as so many young people play these games.

The fact that the entertainment industry arrived at the White House without any new proposals disappointed but did not surprise Nell Minow, who writes the “Movie Mom” column for Beliefnet.Com and is the daughter of former FCC chairman, Newton Minow. It was ironic, she said, that the Biden meeting came the day before the opening of “Gangster Squad,” an intensely violent film that postponed a September premiere out of sensitivity to the Aurora, Colo., movie theater massacre.

“Nobody’s asking to go back to the Hays Code, but the studios have a lot of work to do to protect young kids from material that’s not intended for them,” Minow said. “A 12-year-old can see explicit movie trailers [on YouTube] that they never used to be able to see in the theaters. We can do a lot better. It is time to take another look.”

But that doesn’t sit well with free speech advocates, who believe there are few legitimate ways the government can curb violence in the media.

“What really is open is what is going on today, which is jawboning,” said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, a notable First Amendment attorney. “And that’s always going to be imperfect particularly in the Internet age.”

While this summer’s U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning a California law that banned the sale of violent video games to children without parental supervision was the most recent, the United States has a long history of legal protection for depictions of violence.

“There’s a long tradition in the law of protecting depictions of violence,” Richards said. “There is an astounding amount of agreement among the federal courts on this. You cannot regulate violence in the media without some kind of causal connection between the viewing of violence and violent behavior in media.”

Reports that people like Newtown, Conn., shooter Adam Lanza played violent video games before they went on a rampage doesn’t prove anything, Richards explained.

“That’s not a causal connection,” he said. “That shooter has probably also washed with soap or ate a Snickers bar. You have to prove some type of causation in order to restrict the depiction of violence.”

While there have been repeated assertions that violent images — whether they’re shown on a movie screen, on television or in a video game — leads to violence in real life, it has yet to be proven that one leads to another, experts say.

“In order to justify restraints, they would have to make some extraordinarily definitive findings,” Schwartzman said. “It’s inconclusive, and it goes as much one way as the other.”

Biden seemed to indicate that the administration wanted to get information that might clear up that ambiguity.

“The last area, which is an area that has come up, has to do with the ability of any agency to do any research on the issue of gun violence,” he said in a pool report before the Thursday night meeting. “For example, we’re meeting before the week is out with the gaming industry — I don’t mean gambling — with the video game industry.”

Biden likened the effort to the one the government began in the 1970s to find out what was causing people to die on the highway.

The government’s attempts to regulate violent speech differ from its attempts to regulate obscenity and indecency. Governmental attempts to regulate obscene and indecent speech have been more successful.

While obscene speech enjoys no First Amendment protection, indecent speech does. But the government can regulate indecent speech when it is broadcast over-the-air. Even then, the government had to convince the Supreme Court it had a legitimate right to impinge on free speech in order to protect children.

The government’s most successful attempt to regulate violent speech came in 1996, when Congress approved the V-chip as part of the Telecommunications Act. Congress was able require TV-set makers to include the V-chip, but the content industry had to voluntarily agree to the television ratings system that allows parents to filter content for violence, language or sexual activity.

While the V-chip is available for use and nearly all TV shows include the content ratings, most people don’t bother to set their TVs to filter out content they find objectionable.

Regulating speech in a video game, a movie or on a TV show that does not use the public airwaves faces an even tougher hurdle, not the least of which is defining exactly what is violent.

“Define the difference between Shakespeare, Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg or ‘Grand Theft Auto,’” Schwartzman said. “You can’t.”

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 11:03 p.m. on January 10, 2013