Policy battles over defining children's educational television

Rather than resolving the debate about children's programming policy, congressional approval of the Children's Television Act of 1990 (CTA) actually served to trigger a number of battles about the technical details for implementing the new law. These details, such as defining what content qualifies as educational, were left to the discretion of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). This analysis reviews the policymaking process that followed the adoption of the CTA, the industry's initial response to the new law, and the developments that led the FCC to establish more stringent rules in 1996 for enforcing the CTA requirements.