Bush yesterday signed the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act ("FECA") into law. On the face of it purports to protect copyright, which is why Hollywood was keen to have it, but at the same time it insulates companies that develop DVD-players that edit out offensive content from legal action. Rogier is asking why we would need to have another V-Chip and the conservative movie bloggers at Libertas are equally dismayed:

Now, my attitude about these things is that if parents don’t want their children watching offensive material, they should simply not buy/rent the DVDs. I know some of you will say, “That’s impractical, you can’t imagine how difficult it is to raise kids in this new media environment in which everything is available to them.” Fine, but we’re basically now trampling over copyright law for what is essentially just your convenience.

Indeed. Allowing parents to block a TV-show is one thing, but to let your DVD-player edit the actual content of movies is quite another. It all comes back to the recurrent theme of taking responsibility, which is something that parents are increasingly unable to handle and where outsourcing to third parties is often the preferred option. Yet, there's good reason to start looking critically at the impact of today's entertainment on youth culture as this piece of news from Britain reveals.

Parental action is probably too fragmented to make any impact. In a way parents have unwittingly opened the door to outside regulation: a pro-active media insustry that will start to look critically at its own products or an increasingly enthusiastic (nanny) state. Guess who has the longest breath?

UPDATE: More or less related to the issue of parents stepping back from their natural role as responsible educators, here's LaShawn Barber:

People are just too afraid, too busy, too tired, too ignorant, too lazy or too slack to even try to raise decent human beings. And we wonder why America is going to hell in a handbasket.