RTNDA Fights Broadcast Restrictions.

The U.S.-based Radio-Television News Directors Association urged American lawmakers to reject Congressman Henry Hyde's "Culture of Violence" amendment to the Juvenile Crime bill (the bill proposed in the wake of the Columbine High School shootings) on the grounds that it violated protected speech.

The language in Hyde's amendment recommended that knowingly exhibiting to a minor "any picture, photograph, drawing, sculpture, video game, motion picture film or similar visual representation or image, book, pamphlet, magazine, printed matter or sound recording" that contains "explicit sexual or violent material," would constitute a felony.

The association argued that the amendment would infringe on the editorial decision-making process in newsrooms nationwide. In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Barbara Cochran, president of RTNDA, warned that "Chairman Hyde's amendment, which would take the unprecedented step of criminalizing speech that is not sexually obscene, threatens to sweep news programming under its broad umbrella of proposed content regulation."