December 15, 2010

Turning Down the Volume

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What is money? What is — hold on a second. Who cares? The White House press office has emailed to tell me that President Obama just signed a new law:

S. 2847, the “Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation or the “CALM Act,” which requires the Federal Communications Commission to prescribe a regulation limiting the volume of audio on commercials transmitted by television broadcast stations, cable operators, and other multichannel video programming distributors.

IT’S ABOUT DAMN TIME. Oops. Sorry about that. Anyway, assuming that the FCC adopts a decent rule, this is good news. And it only took 40 years!

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We've never been very good at being conservative.

And usually, that serves us well in doing the ambitious, hard-hitting journalism that you turn to Mother Jones for. But it also means we can't afford to come up short when it comes to scratching together the funds it takes to keep our team firing on all cylinders, and the truth is, we finished our budgeting cycle on June 30 about $100,000 short of our online goal.

This is no time to come up short. It's time to fight like hell, as our namesake would tell us to do, for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability has a chance at the polls and in the press. If you value our reporting and you can right now, please help us dig out of the $100,000 hole we're starting our new budgeting cycle in with an always-needed and always-appreciated donation today.

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