Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

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In a society like ours, in which people have become increasingly isolated from each other in their offices, private cars, single-family living units and television-watching, sharing personal information has become a rarity. The extended family is gone and neighborhood community gatherings are increasingly the exception to the rule. There is less and less interpersonal sharing of intimate problems, few windows into other people's lives. Now our only windows are professional counselors, psychiatrists, and, least expensive and most available, television. It becomes the window for most people. That it looks into fictional lives is irrelevant.

Reports similar to the HEW report have been published many Mimes. Recently, Dr. George Gerbner, dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, and Dr. Larry Gross of the same institution completed a study for the National Institute of Mental Health, reported upon in Psychology Today (April 1975). Gerbner and Gross found that "Although critics complain about the stereotyped characters and plots of TV dramas, many viewers look on them as representatives of the real world. Anyone who questions that assertion should read the 250,000 letters, most containing requests for medical advice, sent by viewers to 'Marcus Welby, M.D.' during the first five years of his practice on television.

"Imagine a hermit," they suggest, "who lives in a cave linked to the outside world by a television set that functions only during prime time. His knowledge of the world would be built exclusively out of the images and facts he could glean from the fictional events, persons, objects and places that appear on television. His expectations and judgments about the ways of the world would follow the conventions of TV programs with their predictable plots and outcomes. His views of human nature would be shaped by the shallow psychology of TV characters."

Gerbner and Gross found definite distortions of reality in three areas that they measured:

Heavy viewers of television were more likely to overestimate the percentage of the world population that lives in America; they seriously overestimated the percentage of the population who have professional jobs; and they drastically overestimated the number of police in the U.S. and the amount of violence. In all these cases, the overestimate matched a distortion that exists in television programming. The more television people watched, the more their view of the world matched television reality.

Knowledge that the television programs were fictional-surely no one who watches them can consciously doubt that. . .

"adults are having only slightly less-hard time than children separating what is television from what is life. "

police dramas are fiction-does not prevent one from "believing" them anyway, or at least gaining important impressions which lead to beliefs.

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