At times, it may seem as if politicians on either side of the Right/Left divide can agree on anything, but apparently everyone thinks that television commercials are too damn loud. Yesterday, the US Congress passed something called The Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, which says that the FCC must require advertisers to reduce the volume of television commercials within one year.
The Congress vote yesterday followed a unanimous Senate vote in favor in September; Democratic representative Anna Eshoo, who sponsored the bill, said in a statement following the vote, “Consumers have been asking for a solution to this problem for decades, and today they finally have it.” She’s not wrong about this having been a major problem for consumers; it’s appeared as one of their top complaints in 21 of the FCC’s last 25 quarterly reports. The CALM act – and, yes, I think they chose that name just for the acronym as well – now awaits President Obama’s signature before becoming law.
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