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Senator ROCKEFELLER. Do you think the record companies had been planning on doing this before you all approached them? I mean, this business has been going on, MTV and all the rest of it, for some time now. I do not know how long you have been in existence, but the problem is bad and apparently getting worse. It brings to the fore the terror that exists on the part of all parents, and goes to the whole question of what it is that our children are learning and seeing that confronts us every day. Was this simply the result of your conversations with them, that they suddenly agreed to decide to do some labeling? Mrs. BAKER. Senator, over a year and a half ago the National PTA passed a resolution and wrote to the music industry, direct recording industry, asking them to label sexually explicit, violent, profane, or material that encouraged the use of drugs and alcohol. And that, as far as I know, got no response from the industry. But there have been calls for this sort of thing. Some, very few but some, albums have been labeled as objectionable to some people. So there has been a little bit of this done in the industry in the past, but it has been very small. And our hope is that there would be a uniform application across the board in the recording industry to give parents and consumers warning when explicit, blatant, violent material is in the album or any music product. Senator ROCKEFELLER. Those companies which are declining to go along with labeling, which I take it to be about 20 percent of the volume, what are they giving as reasons for not going along? Mrs. BAKER. We have not had direct conversations with them. We have been speaking with Stanley Gortikov, who is head of the Recording Industry Association of America, and he represents the majority of companies that produce the majority of records. And so I could not speak to that. Senator ROCKEFELLER. Is there any serious doubt with serious people to whom you have talked that there is a direct relationship between violence and disturbing tendencies and occurrences among young people and the proliferation of this type of material that we have seen this morning. Is there any serious doubt that there is not a direct relationship between those two? Or are there some who would argue that you are simply trying to suppress first amendment rights? Mrs. BAKER. Well, some make the point -- and it is certainly true -- that sex and violence pervade every level of our society today. So we would just say that music, which is a very important part of young people, young people who are forming their characters and developing their value systems, learning how to relate to the opposite sex -- even what they think about sex is not defined in their minds yet. We think that it does have an influence on these young minds. But we certainly do not blame music for the ills, all the ills that exist in the teenage population, the younger children. Senator ROCKEFELLER. Is the relationship between the escalation of the so-called MTV phenomenon and the things that we have seen this morning, and the problems that exist in the teenage population is incontrovertible in your mind? Mrs. BAKER. Absolutely.

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