Posted on 09/27/2009 2:44:49 AM PDT by nickcarraway
YOU’RE A prudent parent, and you protect your children from behavior that is needlessly risky or harmful. You don’t let them ride a bicycle without putting on a helmet. You wait with them for the school bus, or drive them to school yourself. You wouldn’t dream of letting them drink alcohol, and if you caught them with cigarettes, you’d go through the roof.
So why do you let them watch so much TV?
For turning brains into mush, you can’t do better than television. The “vast wasteland’’ Newton Minow deplored in 1961 is infinitely vaster now - a largely unrelieved wilderness of mindless, stupefying entertainment, where dysfunction vies for predominance with vulgarity, and where the insatiable hunger for ratings eventually overpowers every consideration of taste, morality, and intellect.
TV isn’t called the idiot box for nothing. Even at its best it replaces engaged and active thought with passive and sedentary spectating, while at its worst it destroys children’s innocence, inuring them to violence, mockery, and crude sexualization. Television is by definition a visual medium; it appeals not to the brain but to the eye. You don’t have to study hypnosis to understand how easily the eye can be exploited to undermine alertness, focus, and good judgment. Just look at the dazed and vacant expression on the face of a youngster watching TV. Most parents would be calling 911 if their child drank something that caused such a reaction. Why doesn’t the zoned-out oblivion induced by TV cause parents to panic? Is it because they’re hooked on it too?
“Television Addiction Is No Mere Metaphor,’’ reported Scientific American a few years back, and the identity of the world’s foremost TV junkies is no mystery. It’s us. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
I’m retired and when I have nothing better to do...I watch a bit of Fox news each day...then I pretty much stay with nature and science and history type shows on the History, Discovery, Science, and also stuff the military channel has to offer.....Baseball whenever the Yankees play....and just 1 or 2 regular tv shows....(comedy/drama type) a week. oh and I have an unhealthy need to see large deer or elk shot to death on hunting shows as part of my Saturday morning fair (the ones I shoot are usually much smaller).
not really a trash watcher. I will keep the tv on for noise and company while I surf the web...
I really don’t see the issue here....if you watch, watch good stuff....but take everything with a grain of salt as the libs that produce most shows have a message you don’t want to fall for....
Hear, hear. And Football all day Sunday.
good.
That first paragraph does not describe me very well. My kids left the umblical cord at an early age.
I never got that bug.....I start watching football games during the playoffs or just before...and then only glancingly...at least till the Superbowl... by then I know little or nothing about most of the teams/players. I do enjoy a good game, but could quote you no stats.
I would rather spend my fall in the woods terrorzing Deer, Rabbits, Pheasants, fall tukey, grouse.....when I am not on my boat fishing for the fall species...Sundays I often spend at the range shooting Cowboy Action Shooting....
I am a Bronx boy born and bred (who now lives in the burbs), grew up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium.....the NY Yankees are the only team I follow (religiously...and I can quote those stats), though I like the football Giants not crazy over the Jets....the Mets and Red Sox bite the big one....
My grandparents and parents called it the “boob tube”...
You’d think that since I am still unemployed I would be sitting in front of the thing eating bon bons and watching Oprah all day...
Nope...
But the line up you state is what I do watch, when I am done looking for work, to relax...
Otherwise, it is Drudge Report, talk radio on in the background, and discussing issues on Free Republic...
It has kept me sane...Somewhat...Some people would argue that point...Just ask anyone on the Texas board...
hehehe
One of the best things any parent can do is to eliminate television in the house for their kids. One of the worst things about television is that it soaks up an incredible number of hours that could be devoted to much more productive activity. Anything from reading to hiking to hobbies is far more productive than the vast majority of television.
[Just look at the dazed and vacant expression on the face of a youngster]
I think that the same expression can be found on any child during indoctrination at your local school...and it lasts into adulthood.
MMMMM... MMMM... MMM
---Fred Allen. (Who, ironically enough, has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for contributions to . . . television. One presumes both as a personality---he was one of the original panelists on What's My Line---and frequent critic; the Museum of Broadcast Communications calls Allen, of all people, television's first intellectual conscience.)
He also said, more famously (and on the premiere edition of The Big Show, the legendary last-gasp attempt to stage a major comedy-and-variety show on network radio from 1950-52, hosted by Tallulah Bankhead with another radio legend, Goodman Ace, as the head writer), "You know, television is called a new medium, and I have discovered why it's called a medium---because nothing is well done."
Television does have its occasional use-—a good vintage movie, and a baseball game.
The goal of tv is to sell eyeballs to advertisers.
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