As I'm sure many of you are aware, Super Bowl LX, featuring the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots, took place last night. The Seahawks won. But that's not what this podcast is about.

Let's talk about the commercials. For many people who are not football fans, the commercials are the main selling point of the Super Bowl. The game often features creative and innovative ads, leading to widespread discussions and conversations. Super Bowl commercials have impacted pop culture.

As for me, while I was watching the game last night, I noticed something was a bit off. Practically all of the commercials did not have any captioning at all. While it's true that a high percentage of commercials don't have captions, Super Bowl ads typically are captioned due to the fact that there's a large audience watching them. But not this year, ads and ads went by, and the huge majority of them didn't have captions.

At first I thought it was because I was using a streaming service, but nope. Browsing social media today, I saw many Deaf content creators complaining about the lack of captioning. One of them did the math, and apparently there were about 45 minutes worth of advertising time that didn't have any captioning at all.

The Deaf community was rightly outraged about this. However, what many of them ... especially the MAGA Deafies ... fail to reason is the reason why there was such a drastic reduction in captioning this year. It's because the federal government abolished DEI, and started actively going after companies that implemented DEI policies.

Let's not forget that the "I" in DEI stands for "Inclusion." And the reason why companies started to caption their ads was so they could be more inclusive of the Deaf community. But with DEI gone ... so went the motivation for companies to caption their commercials. I mean, why spend all that money to caption their stuff just to accommodate an extremely tiny percentage of their audience?

It's ironic that many of the Deaf people I saw whining about the lack of captioning during yesterday's Super Bowl ads were MAGA themselves, and viciously anti-DEI. By being so utterly against DEI, they shot themselves in the foot, and now they're suffering the consequences of a world that doesn't feel the need to cater to a dwindling Deaf population.

FAFO, indeed.

2 Video Comments

1. 

   1

   2

   matSeattle2

   17 hours ago

   ReplyTo:   Snark Bait