What you can restrict: children

You can pass laws restricting TV murder and mayhem to certain hours, demand parental advisories on CDs, ban the rental of blood-and-guts videos and games to minors but you'll never stop violent material from being timeshifted, downloaded, burned, ripped or somehow landing in the hands of kids with access to electronic equipment.

And there's a good chance that kids have that access right in their own rooms – with their parents' blessing.

According to the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, 57 per cent of kids aged 8 to 16 have TV in their rooms while 39 per cent have gaming equipment.

That was seven years ago. Imagine the stats now with computers, mobile phones, PVRs, iPods and other gadgets that can be used to watch, listen to or play entertainment.

So the truth is, yesterday's recommendations on media violence put forward by a well-meaning coalition from trustee, parent, teacher federation, principal and student organizations representing both Ontario's public and Catholic systems, are as realistic as the exploding heads on Nintendo, c. 1985.

Which is to say, not at all.

At their news conference, coalition leaders acknowledged that "legislation is rarely a perfect solution" – and yet they pressed for changes to the laws.

It's not enough that the industry has self-imposed hours of 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. when "programming which contains scenes of violence intended for adult audiences shall not be telecast."

The coalition wants Parliament to amend the Broadcasting Act "to establish a watershed hour of 9 p.m." – to enshrine it in law.

As if that would ever happen under the let-the-market-reign Conservatives.

Besides, how does one define violence?

Does the news count?

What's more, 9 p.m. here is 6 p.m. in B.C. Thanks to timeshifting, fans of CSI in the GTA would have to wait until midnight to see the re-enactment of the latest gruesome murder.

Unless of course they caught it on the originating U.S. channel – and there would be no stopping that since, under the current simulcasting rules, Canadian signals can only replace U.S. signals if the programs play at the same time.

Then there are the U.S. channels such as TBS that are never simulcast.

Get the violent picture?

There's more.

How many children got the latest video game for Christmas? How many dads play carjacker games with their sons? How many moms take advantage of their children's media addictions to do chores or relax?

How many families watch TV movies together? How many of those flicks are family-friendly? How many parents take advantage of the parental controls on digital boxes? How many "POS" – parents over shoulder – are there when daughters are in chat rooms?

As for CDs, well, do kids even pay for music any more?

Exactly.

So when the coalition "strongly recommends" that Queen's Park passes a law for an "age-based classification system for music recordings" it's just pasting a tiny R-rated sticker on a bursting e-dam.

Fact is, you can put great big billboards on these products and parents will still buy them – partly because they're truly unaware of the deleterious effects of so much daily media exposure (of any kind), partly because it's the path of least resistance, partly because parents really want the stuff for themselves.

Where the coalition gets it right is on the subject of media literacy, both for children and parents. There can never be enough education in an age of behemoth merged and converged media corporations that cross-promote their products on multiple platforms.

Some material is already available for download on the Ontario Public School Boards' Association site.

But parental support, and the accompanying research, have been out for decades. In the 1990s, the industry and the federal broadcast regulator spent millions on studies to raise awareness and to formulate codes of ethics.

Still, the problem persists.

Which means the solution lies in one place alone.

The power switch.

You have the power.

Use it.