Amount of Advertising Allowed on TV

“All television is educational television. The question is: what is it teaching?” ~ Nicholas Johnson

“Television has a changed a child from an irresistible force to an immovable object.” ~ unknown

First we will begin with children who what on average more than 3 hours of TV each day. These programs are limited to 12 minutes per hour of advertising during this time. We also note that the FCC (Federal Communications Committee: created in 1934) requires that commercial TV station provide 3 hours of core/educational programs each week between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. The programs need to be at least 12 hours in length.

Now as too regular TV regulations on advertising, I can’t find any. Some think it may be between 10 ½ to 12 minutes per hour, but I can’t find any data or law to back that up.

TVs were invented in the 1920s but did become common until of 1950s. Like radio, it was regulated by the FCC and still is. Stations had to have licenses and still do. And they had: an obligation to serve the interest of the community. This obligation requires the licensee to 'ascertain the needs of the community' and then provide program service to foster public understanding of those issues. How the licensee provides programming to serve the needs [was] left to the licensee's discretion.

New rules were adopted in 1972 for cable TV.

It would seem that since TV and radio are privileges granted to stations that should be regulated by the regulatory agency it terms of time limits on advertising.

As to actual regulations for the time per hour allowed for advertising I can’t find any. Perhaps there are none and never were. What we do know is that today typically a ½ hour program has 22 minutes of content and 8 minutes of advertising (6 min. for national and 2 for local). Or, in 10 hours of TV you get about 3 hours of advertising which is about double what it was in the 1960s when a typical commercial of 30 seconds to 1 minute.

Growing up I thought it was an FCC rule that there were on 3 minutes per half hour or hour that was legal. But it appears that was just myth.

The idea of radio and TV was that it existing and was licensed to provide for the public welfare. It seems today that it is more just an example of unregulated who can get the most bucks standard.

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Now to another related area.

Have you ever tried to compare how much time on an usual TV news program is spent on hyping coming news versus the actual news itself. Now I haven’t sat down with a stopwatch and figured this out nor can I find any source that has, but my guess it would be about 75% hype and 25% actual news, and that might be generous. Or in mobile news, from the Internet etc., it is estimated at 92% hype [McKinsey and Company.] With this said, I must admit that I spend most of my time searching for news on the Internet than TV as I can research it better for accuracy and ignore most of the hype.

We typically watch Good Morning America (GMA) for our news. It looks and acts more like a social club that a news organization, even though we like the characters. But news? “This is what we will report next hour” “ this is what we will report, next half hour”, “this is what we are about to report,” “stayed tuned for our news on…”… then the story is about a half minute long.

I guess that is enough grumping for today.