Four Arguments for Elimination of Television

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I have already stated my opinion that one major result of modern science has been to make people doubt what they would otherwise accept as true from their own observation and experience. Science, medicine, psychology and economics all deeply depend on people being mystified by their own experience and blind to the strict limits of scientific method.

In this country, where intervention between humans and their inner selves is so very advanced, the mystification is virtually total.

If the National Institutes of Health funded a $5 million study over a three-year period which gathered together all the "experts" to determine the effects of television on the body and mind, and then reported its findings to the President of the United States, who, frightened by the results, then appointed a commission of scholars and other experts to do it over again, one of whom smuggled a copy of the original "findings" to The New York Times, which then carried it on page one: SUPPRESSED STUDY SUGGESTS TELEVISION IS ADDICTIVE, HYPNOTIC, STOPS THOUGHT: SIMILAR TO BRAINWASHING: OTHER PHYSICAL EFFECTS NOTED, then people would say, "You know, I always thought that might be true."

In my opinion, if people are watching television for four hours every day and they say they can't stop it, and also say that It seems to be programming them in some way, and they are seeing their kids go dead, then really, I deeply feel there is no need to study television. This evidence is what lawyers call "prima facie" proof. The only question is how to deal with it. I am satisfied that most people are already perfectly aware of what television is doing to them, but they remain tranquilized by the general wisdom that: the programming is the problem, and it is useless to attempt to change it anyway. Television is here to stay.

In the end, however, perhaps because this mystification also lurks in me, I decided to ask around in the scientific community to see who, if anyone, was concerned about the nature of the television experience.

Invisible Phenomenon

I contacted the Brain Information Service of the Bio-Medical Library of UCLA and spoke with Dr. Doris Dunn there. I asked her if that was an appropriate place to seek any published materials, including doctoral dissertations, which could relate television to a variety of medical and physiological syndromes.

She told me that the computer there could scan as many as a half million items covering the neuroscience literature published since 1969. She said it was probably as thorough a scanning service as existed for this kind of material.

I told her that I was interested in anything that made any relationship between television and the following: Hypnosis, addiction, hyperactivity, the neurophysiology of light reception, brainwashing, dreaming, 'thinking, brainwave activity.

I told her that I was also interested in anything that could be uncovered concerning any neurophysiological responses to television and that I'd appreciate her adding her own creative good judgment.

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