Not all federal regulations are bad
Humans, as a rule, don’t always behave logically.
(After all, how else do we explain the existence of “Fear Factor” and the popularity of basketball?)
Personally, I have run into no greater cognitive disconnect in logic and behavior than the grumbling over the new rules the Federal Communications Commission just approved to tone down the volume on television commercials.
Let’s start with some background: Odds are, if you ask someone if they’re annoyed by commercials that are much louder than whatever they’re watching, they’ll say yes. In fact, a poll taken last year found that 86 percent of people surveyed said exactly that.
And if you ask that same group if they wished that the commercials were not in fact louder than the program, again it would be pretty darn likely that they’d agree. After all, the volume can vary in decibels between the sound level of a restaurant conversation to a running garbage disposal, which is incredibly jarring no matter how often it happens. (Since 2002, in fact, loud advertisements have been one of the top complaints the FCC receives.)
So to recap: just about everyone thinks that commercials are too loud and wants them to be quieter.
Now here comes the rub.
If you tell them that the federal government passed new regulations to ensure that those very commercials that annoy them are going to be quieter, well, are you in for a treat.
Regulations? Federal government? Yeeeeah… All of a sudden it doesn’t seem like a good idea.
The Greek GOP chorus is predictable: “The last thing we need is more regulations!” “Why won’t the government just stay out of things?” “Let the free market handle it.”
My [relative to remain nameless for my sake because the holidays are coming up] did this exact dissonant song and dance. He had literally just finished complaining that the commercial on television was too loud when it was suggested the government do something about it. Suddenly, the commercial was just fine. The government, we were told, should stay out of it.
Wait, what?
This regulation (yes, I keep saying the word “regulation;” it is not, in reality, a slur) accomplishes exactly what the majority of Americans want it to do. The government is doing the will of the people, which is what we say it’s supposed to do. (Unless the people’s will disagrees with your will.)
Yet our political biases and partisan defaults won’t let us acknowledge that we could possibly support something that is done by the inept, socialist, corrupt, lazy, incompetent, wasteful government. (Thank you, years of efforts to undermine any faith in our government!)
Now, I’m not sure I agree with the FCC that loud commercials are “one of the most persistent problems of the television age,” as they referred to them in the press release announcing the new rules, but I doubt there’s going to be many Americans who are crying in their Cheerios this morning that they won’t have to scramble for the remote when the Steelers game goes to commercial break in a race against an auditory assault by Bud Light.
Toning down overly loud commercials is a good thing. The public wants it. The government is going to make it happen. Even the companies who will have to follow the rules are on board.
Of course, this flies in the face of what we’re always told about regulations: they kill business by saddling them with expensive rules to follow like, say, telling factories they can’t dump toxic chemicals in our water supply (how absurd!).
In this case, that old trope doesn’t stick very well: the new rule requires TV distributors to set up equipment to monitor the average sound level of ads as they come in and offending spots will have to be adjusted before they can be aired. (How unreasonable! I’m not sure how the industry will ever recover from that!) The FCC is even giving distributors until December 2014 to comply, just in case following the new rules would place a “financial burden” on them. That was enough to get the National Association of Broadcasters on board.
“We think that the FCC struck the right balance,” said spokesman Dennis Wharton.
And while the “free market will solve it” approach only led to more loud commercials — “Nobody wanted to be the quiet guy in the set of commercials,” said an official at a company that distributes ads to broadcasters — just the hint of regulation was turning the tide in the right direction. In the months leading up to the FCC’s release of the new rules, advertisers were already turning down the noise because many broadcasters are now rejecting loud ads.
So here’s the challenge: We actually have a government regulation with bi-partisan support here — not to mention the support of the businesses to which it applies — so let’s try and act like it.
We may not be able to agree that the banking industry needs regulated — you know, the same group of people who destroyed the economy and cost us millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs because it wasn’t regulated — but we all can breathe a little easier at night knowing that the Sham-Wow guy isn’t going to cause your ears to bleed.
That’s cause for some not-too-loud celebration.
If you’d like to yell at him in a level consistent with this column, Brandon Szuminsky can be reached at bszuminsky@heraldstandard.com.