Television: the cyclops that eats books

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 1993 by Larry Woiwode

This report is buried in an alumni publication of the University of Illinois. In 1982, the National Institute of Mental Health published its own study: "Television and Behavior: Ten Years of Scientific Progress and Implications for the '80s." It stated that there is overwhelming evidence that violence on TV lends to aggressive behavior in children and teenagers. Those findings duly were reported by most of the major media in the early 1980s and then forgotten.

Why do such reports sink into oblivion? --because the American audience does not want to face the reality of TV. They are too consumed by their love for it.

Television eats books. It eats academic skills. It eats positive character traits. It even eats family relationships. How many families spend the dinner hour in front of the TV, seldom communicating with one another? How many have a television set on while they eat breakfast or prepare for work or school?

What about school? I've heard college professors say of their students, "Well, you have to entertain them." One I know recommends using TV and film clips instead of lecturing, "throwing in a commercial every 10 minutes or so to keep them awake." This is not only a patronizing attitude, it is an abdication of responsibility. A teacher should teach. However, TV eats the principles of people who are supposed to be responsible, transforming them into passive servants of the Cyclops.

Television eats out our substance. Mander calls this the mediation of experience. "[With TV] what we see, hear, touch, smell, feel and understand about the world has been processed for us." When we "cannot distinguish with certainty the natural from the interpreted, or the artificial from the organic, then all theories of the ideal organization of life become equal."

In other words, TV teaches that all lifestyles and values are equal, and that there is no clearly defined right and wrong. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, one of the best recent books on the tyranny of television, Neil Postman wonders why nobody has pointed out that television possibly oversteps the injunction in the Decalogue against making graven images.

In the 1960s and 1970s, many of the traditional standards and mores of society came under heavy assault. Indeed, they were blown apart, largely with the help of television, which just was coming into its own. There was an air of unreality about many details of daily life. Even important moral questions suffered distortion when they were reduced to TV images. During the Vietnam conflict, there was much graphic violence--soldiers and civilians actually dying--on screen. One scene that shocked the nation was an execution in which the victim was shot in the head with a pistol on prime-time TV. People "tuned in" to the war every night, and their opinions largely were formed by what they viewed, as if the highly complex and controversial issues about the causes, conduct, and resolution of the conflict could be summed up in these superficial broadcasts.

The same phenomena was seen again in the Gulf War. With stirring background music and sophisticated computer graphics, each network's banner script read across the screen, "War in the Gulf," as if it were just another TV program. War isn't a program --it is a dirty, bloody mess. People are killed daily. Yet, television all but teaches that this carnage merely is another diversion, a form of blockbuster entertaimnent--the big show with all the international stars present.