Which is to say that the FCC is taking a break from its day-job of bullying media companies that the White House doesn’t like so it can look into the ongoing problem of TV commercials being way louder than they’re supposed to be. This is supposed to be regulated by the CALM Act, passed back in 2012 (it stands for the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, a fine piece of congressional backronym-ing), but the FCC claims “Over the past several years the Commission received thousands of complaints about
loud commercials on broadcast, cable, and satellite television. The high number of complaints took a troubling jump last year, which warrants a second look.” (Although well-intentioned, the CALM Act is actually one of the reasons TV sound quality has generally degraded in recent years, since many networks have responded to the regulations by cranking the volume of non-commercial content up.)
The Commission is formally seeking public comment on the topic, and while there are many, many, many more important topics Americans could be petitioning their government about at present, there is something genuinely refreshing about discovering that there are some things so obnoxious that even the current administration wants to regulate them. Somewhat surprisingly, the call for comment is limiting itself to TV ads, possibly because that’s all the CALM Act covers; in a world where online ads are in some sort of breakneck arms race to discover ever more irritating ways of briefly grabbing attention, it feels like they’d be rife with opportunity for some focus from the Commission.
[via PC Mag]
