Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

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The question to ask is if there is a logic in this selection. Are there reasons why the telescope selects one thing and not another?

There certainly are Dozens of them.

The first and most obvious of these reasons is the one that most critics of evision devote themselves to. The people who control television, businessmen, operate strictly out of considerations of budget and profit, in addition to bringing along their own political, perceptual, and social biases. It was to array their influence that so many thousands of media reformers devoted years of effort to democratizing access to the medium and its content. And yet at present there are still no poor people running television, no Indians, no ecologists, no political radicals, no Zen Buddhists no factory workers, no revolutionaries, no artists, no Communists, no Luddites, no hippies, no botanists, to name only a few excluded groups.

To have only businessmen in charge of the most powerful mind-implanting instrument in history naturally creates a boundary to what A selected for dissemi nation to nearly 250 million people. There can be little disagreement with the point that if other categories of people had control, then the choices would be different. If television is a medium of brainwash, then a more diverse brainwash would surely be an improvement over the sort we get at present.

The overriding bias of television, then, the bias which contains all the other biases, is that it offers preselected material, which excludes whatever is not selected. Now, of course, this is utterly obvious. And, yes, it is true of all experiences. When you are doing one thing, you exclude everything else that you might be doing.

This only becomes significant concerning television when we forget that: [1] someone has selected our experience for us, and [2] we have given up awareness information and experience that is not part of television.

In the years I was researching and working on this book, I only ran into one person who works in television and was speaking publicly on points similar to this one. He was Robert Keeshan, the actor who plays Captain Kangaroo. At the 1974 Communications Seminar at San Francisco State College he said:

"When you are spending time in front of the television, you are not doing other things. The young child of three or four years old is in the stage of the greatest emotional development that human beings undergo. And we only develop when we experience things, real-life things: a conversation with Mother, touching Father, going places, doing things, relating to others. This kind of experience is critical to a young child, and when the child spends thirty-five hours per week in front of the TV set, it is impossible to have the full range of real-life experience that a young child must have. Even if we had an over-abundance of good television programs, it wouldn't solve the problem. "

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