Bias in the Movie Rating Process

For anyone who has paid attention in during a statistics class, it is common knowledge that the more people questioned for a survey and the more diversity there is, the less bias there will be in the results. In a survey, a professional has a set population in mind that he is trying to gather an accurate representation for. In order to properly represent these people, he has to ask as many different people part of that population in order to keep the bias to a minimum. There was no guarantee of protecting children from explicit material until 1968 (Dame in the Kimono). The rating process has a very large possibility of bias because the movies are rated by only 12-15 parents who watch the movie and write down what they think the movie should be rated after they finish watching it (Glickman). In the case of the MPAA, the small group of 12-15 parents that watch and rate movies for the MPAA chosen to represent the entire population of America (more than 300,000,000 people, not to mention all of the people in other countries who also watch American made films) is definitely going to lead to bias and inaccurate ratings.

Dan Glickman, CEO of the MPAA, stated that the parents chosen to rate the movies are to watch the movie and rate it based upon how comfortable they would be with allowing their child to see that movie. After learning this is how they rate the movies, there is an enormous amount of bias that is present in the rating process. Every parent raises their child differently in one way or another so there is no way that 12-15 parents opinion’s can accurately represent how every parent would rate a movie. Those chosen to rate a movie are parents because according to Dame in the Kimono, effective since 1968, the U.S. government can protect children from explicit material and not adults. The content used to determine the rating has definitely changed over the years. In today’s films, PG is generally considered a children’s movie. Back in the 70’s, PG was referred to as “pretty gory” by cynics (Dame in the Kimono). The majority of movies rated PG today do not contain any brutal violence or gore of any kind.

In Dan Glickman’s interview, he stated that about 70 percent of all movies are rated and 30 percent of movies are unrated. The rating of a movie does have an effect on how many people go see the movie (Glickman). After watching the Interview with director Kirby Dick about his 2006 documentary "This Film is Not Yet Rated," I was shocked to find out that not only are the 12-15 people randomly selected parents, they are all also from the Los Angeles area. On top of that, the parents aren’t given any guidelines to follow while rating the movies (Dick).

Not until after I had seen the interview with Kirby Dick did I know that there are no guidelines to follow when the selected few are rating a movie. The directors and producers of movies are forced to change material present in their movies based upon a couple parent’s personal opinions. These parents could simply rate a movie “R” just because they don’t like the film. These parents have way too much control over the ratings of movies. The lack of guidelines and small of parents chosen have driven producers crazy for many years now. They have every right to be very upset by the mediocre rating system. Until there are guidelines to rating movies for these parents and a set of people chosen to rate each and every movie to be rated by the MPAA, there will continue to be a battle between producers of movies and the MPAA and a large amount of bias. In my opinion, the amount of bias present is ridiculous and very unacceptable and the producers and directors of movies have every right to be angry about the movie rating process.