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Not So Harmless Tv

March 2023
1min read


What do my wondering eyes behold but an article in American Heritage by Walter Karp (“Where the Media Critics Went Wrong,” March 1988) trying to convince your readers that television has had no effect on the public.

As a person who does not now have and has never had a television set in his home, 1 am able to observe the deleterious effects of this insidious new drug.

I know of former community activists who now sit in front of their sets giggling night after night at cartoons. Many young lawyers who formerly could have been counted on to have read the daily newspapers from cover to cover prior to eating breakfast now admit they rely upon television as their sole source of information with respect to news.

Slogans, lack of athletic ability, cliché conversations, mass appetites for similar products, fast-food meals, lack of home life, lack of dinner-table talk—all are signs of the new TV age.

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Stories published from "May/June 1988"

Authored by: Peter Andrews

In 1904 the Olympics took place for only the third time in the modern era. The place was St. Louis, where a world’s fair was providing all the glamour and glitter and excitement anyone could ask. The Games, on the other hand, were something else.

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Whistler named his most famous
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Authored by: Bill McCloud

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Authored by: Edward Sorel

In Clare Briggs’s cartoons nobody got chased by twenty cops, nobody broke a plank over the boss’s head, nobody’s eyes popped out on springs. People just acted the way people do, and as a result, the drawings still make us laugh.

Authored by: Garry Wills

The distasteful questions we ask our presidential hopefuls serve a real purpose

Authored by: Joseph Fox

It didn’t last long. But we never got over it.

Authored by: Thomas Fleming

Early in the century a young American accurately predicted Japan’s imperialism and China’s and Russia’s rise. Then he set out to become China’s soldier leader.

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