Cable industry needs to stop its noise over law on loud TV ads

[Commentary] A new federal law intended to keep TV commercials from bursting your eardrums won't take effect until Dec. 13. But the cable industry already is trying to water it down. The National Cable & Telecommunications Association, an industry group, has submitted a petition to the Federal Communications Commission asking for an exemption from the CALM Act for "promotional material." What's that mean? Think about the end of a show or a movie, when your screen gets taken over by what's basically a commercial for an upcoming program. There are frequently explosions or gunfire or people yelling at one another. This is deliberate. All that hullabaloo is meant to get your attention and deter you from changing the channel. A quiet promo is a failed promo. The cable industry is trying to distinguish between the new law's regulation of commercial advertisements and a network's own promos. As written, the law makes no such distinction.

It's pretty simple: The CALM Act says TV viewers are entitled to watch programs without having to grab for the remote every few minutes because of noisy ads. It doesn't say that some ads can be louder than others. It says all ads have to be at roughly the same volume as the program they're riding along with. And promos count as ads. Congress has spoken. The American people have spoken. Time for the cable industry to shut up and listen.