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Popular Culture and Public Affairs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 May 2010

By
Bryan Appleyard
Edited by
John Haldane
John Haldane
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
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Summary

Recently I saw a corporate TV advertisement for the American television network ABC. It showed brief shots of people in other countries—France, Japan, Russia and so on. These people were doing all kinds of things, but they weren't watching television. Americans, the commentary told us, watch more TV than any of these people. Yet America is the richest, most innovative, most productive nation on the planet. ‘A coincidence’, concluded the wry, confident voice, ‘we don't think so’.

ABC pursued the same theme in an advertisement on the back of the magazine TV Guide. It is worth quoting in full.

For years the pundits, moralists and self-righteous, self-appointed preservers of our culture have told us that television is bad. They've stood high on their soap box and looked condescendingly on our innocuous pleasure. They've sought to wean us from our harmless habit by derisively referring to television as the Boob Tube or the Idiot Box.

Well, television is not the evil destroyer of all that is right in this world. In fact, and we say this with all the disdain we can muster for the elitists who purport otherwise, TV is good.

TV binds us together. It makes us laugh. Makes us cry. Why, in the span of ten years, TV brought us the downfall of an American president, one giant step for mankind and the introduction of Farrah Fawcett as one of ‘Charlie's Angels’. […]

Type
Chapter
Information
Philosophy and Public Affairs , pp. 97 - 104
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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