December 12, 2012

At Midnight, Loud TV Commercials Will Go Away

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I have fallen down on my duty to keep track of the CALM Act, which requires TV commercials to have the same average volume as TV programs. Luckily, Adam Weinstein is more conscientious than me, and he reports that the FCC’s new rules go into effect at midnight tonight. In theory, this means no more hucksters suddenly blasting your eardrums and waking the baby whenever Burn Notice goes to a commercial break.

As I’ve mentioned before, I think about this new rule the same way I think about the Do Not Call list. I don’t care if it’s “liberal” or “conservative.” I don’t care if it’s hard to implement. I don’t care whether or not you can justify it from first principles. I just don’t care. All I want is for this to stop, and I’m perfectly willing to bring down the entire weight of the federal government to make it happen. As far as I’m concerned, this might very well be the only thing Congress did in the entire year of 2011 to improve our lives.

UPDATE: Via Twitter, Dave Dayen corrects me. The FCC’s rules were adopted last year, but the CALM Act was passed in the 2010 lame duck session. This means that most likely Congress did nothing useful at all in 2011.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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