Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Captioning for Political Ads

A proposed Minnesota law would force candidates for state-level offices to include closed captioning on broadcast ads and Web sites promotions. The bill has already passed the state senate. But there are loopholes in the measure: Campaigns can opt out by submitting an explanation to state regulators explaining why they haven’t followed the news rules and they also can post transcripts for radio ads on their Web site. The law wouldn’t apply at all to campaigns that skip public financing.