television

"It is not so much the low quality of the fare provided that is troubling. It is much more the difficulty of imagining any order of taste, any way of life with pleasures and learning that naturally fit the lives of the family’s members, keeping itself distinct from the popular culture and resisting the visions of what is admirable and interesting with which they are bombarded."

"First radio, then television, have assaulted and overturned the privacy of the home, the real American privacy, which permitted the development of a higher and more independent life within democratic society."

"Economic problems, notably low productivity and massive underemployment, meant that per capita GNP was very low compared to the West. Combined with the high rate of military expenditure, these economic problems limited the funds available for social investment and consumer spending. Unlike in the West, economic growth in the Soviet bloc did not lead to personal prosperity, and certainly not by the conspicuous standards of the West. This limitation increasingly compromised popular support for the system, especially because television made the public notably in East Germany, thanks to the heavy exposure to West German television, aware of better times elsewhere. Furthermore, viewers in northern Estonia could watch Finnish television. Television ‘soaps’, soap-operas of family life, proved particularly seductive as they apparently showed how families lived in the West. This awareness of a better life elsewhere encouraged the attempt in Eastern Europe not only to provide consumer goods but also to block Western television transmissions."

"My God, how can you stand such things, children? They say, "Mom, don't you know it is only television, it is not real.""

"The young watch television twenty-four hours a day, they don't read and they rarely listen. This incessant bombardment of images has developed a hypertrophied eye condition that's turning them into a race of mutants."

"“Incredibly enough, reality TV has just gotten worse.” “Is that possible? I asked. “Wasn’t Celebrity Trainee Pathologist the pits?” I thought for a moment. “Actually, Whose Life Support Do We Switch Off? was worse. Or maybe Sell Your Granny. Wow, the choice these days makes it also tricky to decide. Bowden laughed. “I’ll agree that Granny lowered the bar for distasteful program makers everywhere, but RTA-TV, never one to shrink from a challenge, has devised Samaritan Kidney Swap. Ten renal-failure patients take turns trying to convince a tissue-typed donor—and the voting viewers—which one should have his spare kidney.” I groaned. Reality TV was to me the worst form of entertainment—the modern equivalent of paying sixpence to watch lunatics howling at the wall down at the local madhouse."

"Television is just another appliance- It's just a toaster with pictures."

"Television, the drug of the Nation, Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation. Where imagination is sucked out of children by a cathode ray nipple. T.V. is the only wet nurse that would create a cripple"

"Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home."

"I know very well the sorts of pressures you're under in television. I don't work in television anymore myself, but I'm constantly hearing from colleagues who present scripts to networks and are told, "The script is too complex. You have to keep it simple because the audience is dumb. You can make more money for the advertisers that way.""

"television, the story box that changed the story field of the world. The commercial aspect of stories threatens the diversity of the world's stories and manners of telling."

"Our perception of the truth is determined by what appears on the screen. If an event is never broadcast, it somehow never happened. The electronic image is the word of God. The corporate state controls most of what is seen and heard on television, what ideas and events can be discussed in the mainstream media and what orthodoxies, including neoliberalism and the war industry, must never be questioned. We suffer an intellectual tyranny as pervasive as that imposed by fascism and communism."

"Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it."

"Like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn’t change people’s habits. It just kept them inside the house."

"One of television’s great contributions is that it brought murder back into the home, where it belongs."

"Seeing a murder on television can … help work off one’s antagonisms. And if you haven’t any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some."

"Watching t.v. doesn't have much of a payoff."

"In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity."

"News is not at all an easy thing to do on television. A good many of the main news items are not easily made visual — therefore we have the problem of giving news with the same standards that the corporation has built up in sound."

"Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it."

"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth."

"On the big screen they showed us a sun But not as bright in life as the real one It's never quite the same as the real one."

"As I sat in my office last evening, waiting to speak, I thought of the many times each week when television brings the war into the American home. No one can say exactly what effect those vivid scenes have on American opinion. Historians must only guess at the effect that television would have had during earlier conflicts on the future of this Nation during the Korean war, for example, at that time when our forces were pushed back there to Pusan or World War II, the Battle of the Bulge, or when our men were slugging it our in Europe or when most of our Air Force was shot down that day in June 1942 off Australia."

"When the war finally started, we were ready. On January 16, 1991, CNN anchor Bernard Shaw reported to the world, “The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated . . .” As predicted, Iraqi power and communications systems were destroyed by stealth fighter jets and cruise missiles. Every media company based in Baghdad—except CNN—lost power and transmission capabilities. Only CNN broadcast live to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. All channels turned to us for exclusive coverage; there was no place else. Back then CNN was the only global 24/7 news channel. That live coverage of war—the first time it had been televised worldwide—transformed the media landscape. CNN became required viewing for informed citizens and heads of state, the one truly global news source. That has changed now, with multiple cable networks and news breaking on social media. But without the investment in journalism from visionary owners such as Turner, today’s networks focus more on commentary than newsgathering."

"We have found that television is such a huge part of baby boomers' DNA that it makes sense that so much of America's pop culture jargon comes from TV."

"“Come on,” I said, feeling tired and angry. “You don’t really think that. Nobody thinks that any more, do they? How can the public image be so far off from the reality? Does everybody pay more attention to damn television than to real life?”"

"This new request is for additional radio and television to Latin America and Southeast Asia. These tools are particularly effective and essential in the cities and villages of those great continents as a means of reaching millions of uncertain peoples to tell them of our interest in their fight for freedom. In Latin America, we are proposing to increase our Spanish and Portuguese broadcasts to a total of 154 hours a week, compared to 42 hours today, none of which is in Portuguese, the language of about one-third of the people of South America. The Soviets, Red Chinese and satellites already broadcast into Latin America more than 134 hours a week in Spanish and Portuguese. Communist China alone does more public information broadcasting in our own hemisphere than we do. Moreover, powerful propaganda broadcasts from Havana now are heard throughout Latin America, encouraging new revolutions in several countries. Similarly, in Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand, we must communicate our determination and support to those upon whom our hopes for resisting the communist tide in that continent ultimately depend. Our interest is in the truth."

"“Tee Vee is a disease.” “No,” said Alice, laughing. “That’s ‘T.B.’ T.V. isn't a disease. It’s the most wonderful thing. It’s a great box which sits in the parlor at the center of attention; although it clashes with the rest of the furniture and decor. It shows beautiful colored pictures. People sit and look at it all day and night while it tells people what they should think. And what is beautiful. And what is ugly. It is such a wonderful thing that people watch it until they no longer remember how to communicate with each other, and they don’t know how to read anymore, and they lose all their ambition, and they grow fat and all of their muscles stop working. “So you see, it’s not a disease at all. It’s just the most marvelous invention!”"

"If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace."

"The new values transmitters are the television producers, the movie moguls, the fashion advertisers, the gangsta rappers, and a host of other players within the electronic media-cultural complex. ... These trend-setters exert an extremely powerful hold on our culture and our children in particular, and they often have had little or no sense of responsibility for the harmful values they are purveying."

"The culture is unchallenged as the standard setter, and the child’s sense of right and wrong and his priorities in life are shaped primarily by what he learns from the television, the movie screen and the CD player."

"Television encourages separation: people from community, people from each other, people from themselves, creating more buying units and discouraging organized opposition to the system. It creates a surrogate community: Itself. It becomes everyone's intimate advisor, teacher and guide to appropriate behavior and awareness. Thereby, it becomes its own feedback system, furthering its own growth and accelerating the transformation of everything and everyone into artificial form. This enables a handful of people to obtain a unique degree of power."

"I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book."

"We really did try to make the show feel familiar and nostalgic without just being callbacks to things from people’s childhood. I don’t think that’s what nostalgia is even about. It’s about a certain comfort mixed with melancholy for something that’s lost or far away. When you make a film or TV show, you’re literally creating memories for people. Those memories we create go into people’s brains, and they become partially shared memories. So we wanted to create something that would be a good memory."

"Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation."

"Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders."

"Television was the Cold War intellectuals' nightmare, a machine for bringing kitsch and commercialism directly into the home. But it was also the way out of Wertham's trap. By exposing people to an endless stream of advertising, television taught them to take nothing at face value, to read everything ironically."

"I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you—and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland."

"I like to watch."

"For intellectual authority, the appropriate version of Descartes's cogito would be today: I am talked about, therefore I am."

"Bread and circuses—to some observers, welfare and television seemed modern equivalents, pacifiers of empire, protectors of power and privilege. If television has assumed this role, it is not the result of a struggle between good guys and bad guys. If it were, it would be easy to solve, like problems in televisionland. ... The sponsor who thinks in terms of maximizing sales and profits is doing his duty. ... The advertising agency executive who recommends programs and time-slots in terms of audience size and demographic targets is likewise doing his job... The network sales executive who favors programs that advertising agencies will recommend to sponsors is performing his task. ... The problem—the folly—is not in any of these, but in a system that has made the center of national attention a market item, for sale at auction prices. The system has put the leadership of our society on the auction block."

"The luminous screen in the home carries fantastic authority. Viewers everywhere tend to accept it as a window on the world... It has tended to displace or overwhelm other influences such as newspapers, school, church, grandpa, grandma. It has become the definer and transmitter of society's values."

"What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. This is bad for everyone; the majority lose all genuine taste of their own, and the minority become cultural snobs."

"The rockets that have made spaceflight possible are an advance that, more than any other technological victory of the twentieth century, was grounded in science fiction… . One thing that no science fiction writer visualized, however, as far as I know, was that the landings on the Moon would be watched by people on Earth by way of television."

"Television dreams of tomorrow, we're not the ones who're meant to follow. For that's enough to argue."

"Television has become the mirror of our culture, and if we are not in it, we feel that we must not exist."

"The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think."