"Talk show host Springer is contemplating a run for the U.S. Senate from Ohio. Since the Ohio Democratic Party is nearly broke, he says he might be willing to spend up to $20 million of his own money to take the seat ....
... as media and money make it possible for celebrities to leapfrog over the traditional hurdles and tests of public service, Americans need to be very careful about voting for name recognition.
They need to ask, 'Why do I recognize this guy's name?' "
Lonely in America
Interview with Robert Putnam
Atlantic Monthly, 21 SEP 2000
"
You identify mindless television-watching as one of the major causes of our depleted public life. How deeply entrenched is television in American life? Will it be possible to combat television's appeal?
Frankly, this is the one arena in which I find it hardest to maintain my optimism. Both culturally and commercially, entertainment television is an incredibly powerful force, and it is particularly insidious in its effects on kids."
"... Bergman also is a committed intellectual who has made a mission of spreading awareness of what he calls the "grammar of television" to as large an audience as possible. In this way, he's also an activist, one who believes in using the media to reveal how power is exercised, in the pursuit (though he is far too gruff and macho to ever admit this, even to a friend) of truth and justice."
"... I'm rereading -- as you should -- Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Every gross excess Postman and Mander prophesied for television has come to pass. ...
Shows like Jerry Springer and Survivor not only insult our intelligence, they actively disparage human virtues like compassion, dignity, idealism and autonomy. They despise our pride."
"The deep appeal of the show, though, is in its banality.
Meaningless small talk is exchanged.
Expensive objects are admired, and occasionally consumed.
People fret, in a clueless sort of way,
about their appeal and their prospects.
Some clumsy emotional fencing is engaged in.
We are in the world of instincts, hunches, and,
as the saying goes, “chemistry.”
There is not much connected thought taking place:
but then, as Sir Edmund Gosse pointed out, there hardly ever is.
Joe Millionaire is a useful reminder
that while we may indeed be the beauty of the world,
the paragon of animals, in apprehension like gods,
et cetera, et cetera,
we are at the same time very closely related to chimps."
Web site of the book
The Sound Bite Society: Television and the American Mind
by Jeffrey Scheuer.
The War, Brought To You By The White House
To See What Media Consolidation Will Do To British Television,
Look No Further Than The US - Where Glutton Bowl Is Typical Fare
by John Willis
Published on Friday, June 20, 2003 by the Guardian/UK
"There is much to admire on American television. ... But these are a tiny number of programs at the top of a food chain that is long, bland and tasteless, like the endless fast-food restaurants on the edges of American towns, where Arby's and Denny's, McDonald's and Taco Bell compete for neon attention. ...
In this environment, Americans watch anything. ...
For all the warts on British television, a year in America taught me just how lucky we are to have not just the BBC but also a range of diversely funded channels with different layers of public service ambitions and obligations. The lesson from America is that, if news and public affairs are left purely to the market, it will most likely give the government what it wants."
