GSN and kids

A thread on Game Show Paradise actually bashes GSN! Yes, I know it's hard to believe that an oldies board would bash the cable network, but it did happen.

All right, I'll go easy on the sarcasm. Of course, GSN is not beloved on the oldies boards because it mostly runs game shows with less than twenty years of dust on them. But this particular thread dumps on GSN for its "Kids Zone" of children's shows which ran in the late 1990s.

I can barely recall the Kids Zone, except that it seemed mostly dull. GSP seems to think the Zone was just awful because, well, they usually think GSN is just awful in general. This is the board that once went nuts because they thought GSN was going to run Toddlers and Tiaras.

One poster is really out to lunch, though, on FCC rules and regs...

I think GSN's Kids Zone block was originally designed to meet U.S. Government laws requiring networks to air the bare minimum of three hours of educational/informational programming for younger viewers on a weekly basis. Even though I am not a fan of many game shows designed for younger audiences, I am quite shocked that GSN decided to drop E/I programming for children from its schedule by the turn of the millennium, given the FCC's ruling regarding children's educational programming which has been in place since the 1990s.

I'll leave aside how "quite shocked" this guy is. But I can say that he's flat wrong on the FCC mandate. The requirement for three hours of kid shows only applies to over-the-air broadcast television, not to cable. That's why, say, Playboy TV has never had to break into its usual offerings with children's shows.

The rationale for the FCC has always been that the so-called public airwaves need protection from whatever nefarious forces which bureaucrats might see, or imagine they see. Cable operations don't use those airwaves, so they were never subject to the three-hour kid show mandate. Wikipedia has all the legalistic details.

Anyway, GSN mostly gave up on kid shows after 2000. By then so many kid-centric cable outlets had sprouted that network execs probably figured GSN was never gonna draw much of a rugrat audience. Of course, those cable networks for kids, along with endless children's material on the Internet, make the FCC mandate on over-the-air TV networks silly and obsolete.

But the regs are still there for anybody who uses the sacred public airwaves. It's notoriously tough to kill guvmint regulations of any kind. That's why Buzzr still trots out three hours of kid material - wholly unrelated to game shows - every weekend.