• by Mitch Oscar , Op-Ed Contributor, December 22, 2009

Dec. 16 & 19 news flashes:  Although five major nations, including the United States, had together forged a climate deal, which President Obama called "an unprecedented breakthrough" and conceded that the agreement was merely a political statement and not a legally binding treaty, back in the States, the House of Representatives (with unanimous bipartisan support) passed the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, which will give the FCC rights to develop guidelines to prevent a wide gap between the sound emanating from advertisements - audio, and video possibly - and programs. Apparently, lawmakers have discovered, unbeknownst to the ad community, that there is often times a disparity between the volume, usually louder, of the audio in a commercial and the audio housed within program content. 

 

Hopefully, when the Obama administration, agency regulators and elected officials are able to turn down the volume by enforcing audio parity between all forms of media - they will be able to focus their full concentration on what I consider to be a more serious threat to our quality of life issues dwarfing even the audio effect: "pixel emission." Is the number of pixels utilized by the ad community for commercial creation comparable to those of other nations and their media empires and how do they compare - in what relative proportion - with program content pixel creation. Hopefully, at the appropriate time, the climate will be right for regulators to focus on worldwide pixel reduction goals and accept responsibility along with global leaders to take action to confront the threat of over pixelization in commercials and programs; and then, and only at that juncture, can our administration spend time focusing on other pressing issues that might make a significant contribution to the freedom of media consumption and quality of life issues in the U.S., such as the following unresolved biggies (in non-hierarchical order):

·       multiple ownership of TV stations in the same market

·       national television station ownership (single market and multiple)

·       dual broadcast network ownership

·       broadcast/newspaper/radio cross ownership

·       v-chip utilization/parental controls

·       radio station group ownership (single market and multiple)

·       cable systems operators ownership of programming on their systems

·       cable systems operators and broadcast station cross ownership

·       cable systems operators penetration of national viewership

·       satellite operators ownership programming on their system

·       satellite operators and broadcast station cross ownership

·       satellite/cable/broadcast cross ownership

·       telco/cable/satellite cross ownership

·       net neutrality

·       enforcing cable card deployment

·       must carry broadcast transmissions for all digital terrestrial channels

·       must carry versus transmission consent

·       program availability via fair and equitable licensing arrangements

·       the sanctity of copyright

·       the efficacy of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

·       cable subscription pricing: a la carte vs. package

·       internet access pricing by bandwidth usage and justification of pricing tiers

·        "White Space" exploitation and interference with broadcast signals

·       personal identifiable information transgressions both online and television

·       remote programming storage

·       global warming

·       universal healthcare

·       ballistic shield defense

·       nuclear proliferation

·       airline passengers transporting liquids on planes

·       budget deficits

·       unemployment

·       completion of the rebuild of the World Trade Towers

·       weapons of mass destruction

·       death panels

·       institutionalized financial avarice

·       military surges in less industrialized nations

·       cellphone usage in automobiles