A welcome change
by David Atkins
It’s not the most important rule change in the grand scheme of things, but this is a welcome development nonetheless:
Excessively loud television commercials should be a thing of the past, thanks to the Federal Communications Commission.
Responding to years of complaints that the volume on commercials was much louder than that of the programming that the ads accompany, the FCC on Tuesday passed the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act to make sure that the sound level is the same for commercials and news and entertainment programming…
The act comes a year after Congress passed legislation regarding commercial volume and directed the FCC to come up with enforcement rules. The architect of the bill was Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Menlo Park), who pushed for the legislation after hearing complaints about loud commercials from her family.
The FCC said cable and satellite TV companies as well as local broadcasters will be required to make sure the volume on commercials is kept in check. The rules go into effect in December 2012.
“We’re glad that consumers are finally going to get some relief from extra-loud TV ads,” said Parul P. Desai, policy counsel for Consumers Union. “People have been complaining about the volume of TV commercials for decades.”
It would be easy to joke about this, to call it a luxury 1st world problem, to call it irrelevant when compared with people being foreclosed on and out of work. All of that would be true. But for the millions of Americans of who watch hours and hours of TV every day, this is not unimportant to them. Changing the rule shows that government can be responsive to their needs and do what the “free market” left to its own devices would not.
It’s an easy teaching tool about the power of regulation to step in and force companies to do the right thing when otherwise they would not. And that in turn can have an impact on voter perceptions of regulations that do have more life-and-death consequences.
Now, if only Congress would step in and reverse the ruling allowing pharmaceutical marketing…
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Thank you!
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