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Health & Fitness

We Interrupt This Commercial For Some Important News

Last night I made the horrible mistake of watching a movie on late night television. It took less than half an hour to realize the sun would be coming up before I’d see the final credits – late night shows are nearly half commercials! But I stuck it out, muting the constantly interruptive, unbelievably annoying commercials, until the credits rolled, and I could turn out the lights and blindly feel my way to bed.

It’s a fatal flaw, I admit, but once started, I am “duty bound” to watch every frame of an even bad movie – I keep hoping it will turn out well. But last night’s movie sucked!

I woke up this morning still bugged by the insane number of commercials we have to watch on television – especially on news shows. It seems to me, in the old days, we could watch Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow without hearing about erectile dysfunction, feminine napkins, and all manner of stuff we had no wish to hear about, much less watch!

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A fat lady dancing crazily to demonstrate there are no leaks – is the last commercial on earth I want to watch instead of learning the latest world news.

According to TNS Media Intelligence, the average hour-long prime-time TV show is 36 percent commercials. Reality programs have an average of 13:52 per hour of commercial messages. An average prime-time hour features 21:51 of marketing. Frankly, I thought it was more – I still think it’s more – it feels like more!

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Put another way, by the Centre for Media Studies (CMS), an average of 35 percent of prime-time (7 p.m. to 11p.m.) news is devoted to advertisements – against the per hour limit of 20 percent prescribed by so-called current rules.

Commercials eat up an average of 18-20 minutes every hour. You gotta love em.


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