LOUD TV COMMERCIALS TO GET SCRUTINY HOW TO

It's a smart approach, because Congress is home to lawyers, doctors, activists, and people with all manner of expertise, but conspicuously no audio engineers, and the Advanced Television Systems Committee is understandably full of them. The experts wrote A/85, and Congress passed a law that said A/85 is mandatory, so Congress doesn't have to learn about audio and the problem gets solved.

But it does set acceptable bounds for the soundscape of television. It's not written for most of us to understand. It's fairly clever: all it actually says is that broadcasters and cable operators have to abide by the A/85 standard approved by the Advanced Television Systems Committee, and that the FCC has to enforce that.Ī/85 is essentially an intricate, 72-page technical document that gets extremely specific about how things should sound.

LOUD TV COMMERCIALS TO GET SCRUTINY HOW TO

The CALM act is actually fairly simple it doesn't say 'commercials must be this loud' and it doesn't get into the nitty gritty of how to measure that or enforce it or what consequences shall befall an operator who violates it. Eshoo remarked at the time it was the most popular piece of legislation she had ever introduced in Congress. It cascaded through the legislature, passing the Senate unanimously and the House in a voice vote before then-President Barack Obama signed it. Anna Eshoo wrote the CALM Act after a loud television commercial interrupted dinner, which may be the single best argument for being an elected member of Congress I have ever heard. Sheldon Whitehouse mark the implementation of the CALM Act, the federal law that requires TV ads be no louder than the programs that accompany them, on Dec.

Loud tv commercials to get scrutiny