Who said life is always fair? Sure not the MPAA or the Code and Rating Administration. For example, Mr. Dougherty, a well known name in the movie rating business, allowed major companies to change rating on movies if they edited them to his liking. However, for the smaller companies unaffiliated with major companies this was not the case. Once Dougherty made up his mind, that was it. Bias of the favorites is what I like to call this one. Though this isn’t fair at all to the little man, this is just how life is in the corporate world unfortunately. Of course there are many other biases that have occurred and still are throughout the rating process.
Another bias that is a major concern is personal bias. “If violence is rough or persistent, the film goes into R (restricted) rating” (Aftermath, 281). What ever happened to this? This was the original definition on how violence should be rated through movies, but that is not how it works in our society. People have different opinions about everything and violence is one of them in particular. The “13 or 14 parents” that rate numerous amounts of movies could possibly like violent movies, and find disturbing violent scenes the norm for them (Dan Glickman). This is a major issue because, just like in any experiment in science, you need a large amount of people giving you results to generalize your result for the entire world. “13 or 14 people” are not going to cut it, for MPAA to make a major generalization like this one (Dan Glickman). With only 13 or 14 people rating movies for the world and all of them being parents is a problem. Childless adults have opinions as well and may know more about what is better for children then parents themselves.
MPAA is made up of “one of the most unprofessional boards”, says Kirby Dick. The lack of professional training for this kind of job just doesn’t make sense! For these ratings to be so influential these critics have to be fair when it comes to rating movies. But, once again life isn’t fair and after seeing ten violent movies in a row you have to become numb at some point. Right? To make it plain and simple, the MPAA needs to add more members to its committee to rate movies and randomly allocate which days their employees will rate films so they don’t become “immune” to the monotony of daily routine.
I agree that the whole idea of random parents making critical decisions about the rating of movies is most certainly biased and unprofessional, but like you said, life a'int always fair. But i also agree that an effective way to fix this problem would be to add more members to the board to diversify.
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