Senate Passes CAMRA Act (Electronic Media's Impact on Children)

[mykevermin]

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=10898

The United States Senate has passed the The Children and Media Research Advancement (CAMRA) Act, which includes an investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) into video game and other electronic media use.

The CAMRA Act, which is sponsored by by known video game critics Joseph Lieberman, Hillary Clinton and Dick Durbin, as well as Republicans Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback, would direct the CDC to contract with the National Academy of Science to review and report on research regarding the role and effects, both positive and negative, that electronic media, including television, movies, video games, and the internet, have on the lives of children. The CDC would then provide grants for research focusing on the impact of factors like the format, length of exposure, age of viewers, nature of parental involvement, and venue in which media is viewed.

First introduced by Lieberman in 2003, the CAMRA Act has won support from organizations such as the National Institute on Media and the Family, the Center for Media and Child Health and the American Psychological Association. However advocacy group Citizens Against Government Waste have claimed that the study is redundant since similar research is already underway by non-governmental groups.

“We do not know enough about the effects of electronic media on the development of children,” commented Brownback, one of the Act's sponsors. “Children today are exposed to more media than ever before. Given the saturation of television, video games, and the Internet in the lives of young children, we ought to have a better sense of how electronic media affects children as they grow and mature.”
POSTED: 01.38PM PST, 09/15/06 - Jason Dobson

IMO, this isn't a controversial bill at all (unless you don't like your tax dollars going to things like research, I suppose); however, because it's main sponsor (Liebermann) and some of the co-sponsors (Clinton) have publicly lashed out at games at points in time, they aren't too popular with the gaming crowd. It makes the bill, on the surface, look shady or biased. It's just a funding bill if you read the text of it. At any rate, does anyone have any thoghts on this?

I s'pose this topic is 95% politics and 5% controversy, the precise opposite of most of the posts here.

 

[ElwoodCuse]

It will be a waste of our time and money that will produce a biased result. It's been done before.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attorney_General's_Commission_on_Pornography

 

[Ikohn4ever]

Hell besides it being a huge waste of money, it sounds like some evil bond villian's plan or weapon.

 

[mykevermin]

[quote name='ElwoodCuse']It will be a waste of our time and money that will produce a biased result. It's been done before.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attorney_General's_Commission_on_Pornography[/QUOTE]

That's apple and oranges. The CAMRA act appropriates funding via the CDC (yeah, I think that's weird too) via the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. It's research funding, while a "commission' is, almost without fail, a witch hunt. The biggest difference here is that the NICH-HD and the CDC work as money envoys through the National Academy of the Sciences. You propose a research study, fill out the paperwork (augh! the ing paperwork!), and get approved for a study or denied. There's no real room for biasing the collectivity of studies in this sense, unless, of course, you think that the National Science Foundation and all work done under it are suspect (which is the vast majority of scientific research done in this country).