In just three decades it has had an enormous effect on family relationships, entertainment, education, politics, advertising, news, sports, and other areas of human endeavor.

What Kind of Influence?

Because of television’s influence, some people are saying that it can be blamed for many of this world’s ills. An editorial by William Shannon in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer declared: “If we are a less happy, less confident, less intelligent people than we were 30 years ago, a generation of television watching is largely responsible.”

In the book The Plug-in Drug, author Marie Winn claims that television is largely responsible for a serious decline in reading and writing skills, the tearing apart of the family, the rise of the drug culture, the emergence of a new breed of vicious young criminals, and a generation of children suffering from no less than an imbalance of the mind.

A family man in the United States said: “I am old enough to remember when families or children didn’t have television. I believe television has been one of the most damaging influences to the modern-day family. The extent of the damage is now becoming more evident.”

In Japan, Mrs. Kimiko Takisawa, a leader of the Society for Responsible Television, said that TV has “brought about our cultural destruction.” And the Melbourne, Australia, Sun reported: “Television viewing can have the same effect as severe brain damage.”