Archive: Opinions

EditorialLast June the US House of Representatives voted against a bill that would have permitted the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to use taxpayer dollars to impose the Fairness Doctrine on conservative broadcasters.  The conservatives say the bill was an affront to freedom of speech.  The liberals say that conservative radio is too one-sided.  Critics say that President Reagan's deregulation of the media in the 1980s allowed a few large corporations to buy up important media outlets and control the point of view that is espoused on them.  Liberals point to Fox News.  Conservatives point to the broadcast networks and CNN.

But I think that Republicans and Democrats are completely ignoring what voters really care about.  Since the industry was deregulated the number of commercials has grown and grown, partly because the amount of time allowed has doubled in the past 40 years, and partly because the length of commercials is as much as a tenth what it used to be.

In the 1960s an hour-long program ran 51 minutes.  In this decade that number has been reduced to 42 minutes, allowing a whopping 18 minutes of commercials per hour.  In the late '50s Variety reported viewers saw 5 hours and eight minutes of commercials per week.  In those days commercials typically ran 60 seconds, and that amounted to 420 commercials per week.  In 1971 the standard length had become 30 seconds.  Today they are 30, 15, or even 10 seconds, making that 18 minutes seem like hours.  Theoretically you could view 108 ten second commercials in an hour!

To go to the most ridiculous extreme, since commercials per hour have doubled, it could be that you saw 1176 commercials last week.  Do you remember what all of them were about?  (Well, probably about 800 of them were for the Fucillo Auto Mall, but can you remember what the other 376 were trying to get you to buy?)

To make matters worse, product placement in programs has become sneaky, unlike the '40s and '50s when companies would proudly sponsor a program, and products would be woven into the plots with good humor as Jack Benny famously did with Jell-o and Lucky Strike cigarettes.  Now the game is to get branded products into sitcom and drama character's homes and kitchens, get action heroes to drive a specific brand of car, and so on.  I still remember Don Wilson's rhapsodies on Jell-o 50 years ago.  I couldn't tell you what soda they drank on Friends.

The high brow me takes a ten minute lunch break, and I try to get a snapshot of world news by watching television while I eat.  Between CNN Headline News, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and CNBC, I find myself dealing with the clicker more than I do with my food.  The reason?  I'm lucky if I can get 5 minutes worth of news between the five of them because they are so inundated with commercials which, more often than not, run concurrently on all five stations.  Some days I get none.

To make matters worse, Headline News often doesn't have headlines at all.  They run Larry King Live (though I don't think it's live at that hour) from 11am to noon, and just try finding any headlines there in the evening!  Not to mention the vapid news anchors on most of the so-called respectable news networks... well, that's fodder for a different rant!

The low brow me likes a series on the Sci Fi Channel, which I watch with my whole family.  We record this show and fast forward through the commercials.  But that isn't as much of a remedy as it is made out to be.  My son figured out that during a break, several commercials would run followed by a little Sci Fi logo ditty.  After that two more commercials, and back to the show.

So I started fast forwarding while looking for that branded ditty, then counting the commercials.  What did they do?  They broke up the routine!  You just can't win!

I grew up where reception was great and all the major broadcast networks could be seen over the air.  And I remember that one of the big selling points when cable television began was that yes, you would pay for cable, but you wouldn't have to watch commercials (except on the broadcast networks they carried).  The cable companies have conveniently forgotten that bit, which I find particularly heinous here in Lansing where you either pay hundreds per year for cable (or satellite dish), or miss out entirely on television, because there is no reception.

And you want to know what really gets me?  Studies have reported that television commercials aren't that effective.  I believe that.  There was a really funny one where a "nice guy" is told by a fellow office worker that everybody loves him no matter what, and to demonstrate the point the worker throws a cactus, which sticks into the back of a third office worker.  The victim is about to blast whoever did it when the first guy points to the nice guy.  And the victim laughs through the pain, telling the nice guy how funny it was.  What product are they advertising?  You've got me.  I don't have a clue.  All I remember is that it made me and my son laugh together.

So politicians should try actually talking to their constituents about this media regulation thing.  Nobody cares whether Rush Limbaugh dominates the radio waves.  If you don't like him you can listen to just about anything else on XM, or, as Paul Simon and Art Garfunkle were fond of singing, the sounds of silence.

Arguably the quality of most television shows today is much lower than in the past.  I'm waiting and waiting for a new situation comedy that a) I can watch with my kids and b) is (and I hope my standards aren't out of the ball park on this one) funny.  And the quality of some of the commercials far exceeds that of a lot of the programming.  But after a day of multi-tasking in modern life wouldn't it be great to sit through a drama or a comedy or a news report with a minimum of interruption?

Heck if life were that good I might even watch the commercials!

Self-serving (but true) PS: I get my news any time I want on the Internet.  I even have Lansing Star headlines on my Google home page.  Honestly, paying for cable TV isn't long for this world!

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