By James L. Schulz
I’m a longtime radio broadcaster and after 25 years on the air, I owned an advertising agency where all the work was creating radio and TV ads and video scripts all day, every day. I’ve spent nearly my entire adult life in a studio, wearing headphones.
Schulz, a musician, living with noise-induced hearing loss. In response to a recent article in Hearing Health magazine, he contacted the FCC about a television network’s missing captions.
Now, in the latest iteration of life careers, I'm back to playing music (guitar) and singing live in a variety of venues and paying an awful price for my poor hearing choices early on. I know the broadcasting—I was the bright, good-morning voice at a number of Wisconsin area stations—and the studio work contributed mightily to the hearing loss I now experience.
“It is empowering to actually make a difference for people with hearing loss,” Schulz says.
After reading an article on captioning in the Fall 2019 issue of Hearing Health, I filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about a television network that never captioned any of its programming. Actually, I tried calling my local cable company first. Unable to get through, I followed the advice in the article and went to the FCC website.
However, the procedure with the FCC was easy and intuitive. I handled the entire thing online and was kept abreast of progress via email. After a few weeks, I received a call from the cable company. They wanted to be sure that the problem wasn’t my TV (or me!).
After a few questions and answers, it was immediately apparent that the missing captioning emanated from the network. The cable technician was able to figure out that this network’s programming was actually captioned but only in standard definition. Since these days TVs are normally set to high-definition by default, it just didn’t show up on this channel.
It was a simple, albeit cumbersome, three- or four-step process to switch to standard definition for this channel in order to see its captions, and then to reverse the steps to return to high definition for every other channel and their captions. Hardly worth the effort.
The cable tech told me he’d pass on the info “back at the office,” and to help him get some traction I suggested that he mention that the query was in response to an FCC investigation.
I thought that would be the last of the matter but, a few days later, I happened to turn on that old movie channel and, lo and behold, it is captioned full-time now. A small victory perhaps but I’m feeling good that I made a difference. The lack of captioning on that network may have been the result of a technical misunderstanding or simple oversight.
In any case, I’m enjoying some of those old movies again. The first captioned movie I enjoyed on that channel was “Topaz,” part of an Alfred Hitchcock marathon. I was in heaven! It is empowering to actually make a difference for people with hearing loss.
James L. Schulz lives in Waupaca, Wisconsin. To learn more about his music, which he performs under the professional name Jim King, see his Facebook page.
