People Of A Television Culture Need “plain

The Whole Problem With News On Television Comes Down To This: All The Words Uttered In An Hour Of News Coverage Could Be Printed On A Page Of A Newspaper. And The World Cannot Be Understood In One Page.

When A Population Becomes Distracted By Trivia, When Cultural Life Is Redefined As A Perpetual Round Of Entertainments, When Serious Public Conversation Becomes A Form Of Baby-talk, When, In Short, A People Become An Audience, And Their Public Business A Vaudeville Act, Then A Nation Finds Itself At Risk; Culture-death Is A Clear Possibility.

We Had Learned How To Invent Things, And The Question Of Why We Invent Things Receded In Importance. The Idea That If Something Could Be Done It Should Be Done Was Born In The Nineteenth Century. And Along With It, There Developed A Profound Belief In All The Principles Through Which Invention Succeeds: Objectivity, Efficiency, Expertise, Standardization, Measurement, And Progress. It Also Came To Be Believed That The Engine Of Technological Progress Worked Most Efficiently When People Are Conceived Of Not As Children Of God Or Even As Citizens But As Consumers-that Is To Say, As Markets.

The Past Is Strapped To Our Backs. We Do Not Have To See It; We Can Always Feel It. People Gather Bundles Of Sticks To Build Bridges They Never Cross. People In Distress Will Sometimes Prefer A Problem That Is Familiar To A Solution That Is Not.

Voting Is The Next-to-last Refuge Of The Politically Impotent. The Last Refuge, Of Course, Is Giving Your Opinion To A Pollster.