How Entertainment Mangled Public Discourse

Postman also seems oblivious to the times when the high-end television he despises actually fulfilled its mission of educating and informing the public. The 1960 documentary Harvest of Shame laid bare the terrible conditions under which farmworkers produced our food. Television reporting on the civil rights movement in the South and the violent opposition to it sparked global attention to racial injustice. The war in Vietnam was called “the living room war” for a reason: For the first time in history the horrors of war were made plain to people thousands of miles away every night at dinner time. Today the same thing is happening with Israel’s war on Gaza, although much of the coverage is online only. It is hard to imagine newspapers or books having the same galvanizing, immediate effect. They take too long to arrive, for one thing, and reach far fewer people. For another, broadcast TV is by its nature a communal experience: People watch at the same time and talk about it together, in real time.

The expectation that everything be amusing has a corrupting influence when hard work needs to be done, attention needs to be paid, and the reward is not immediate.

Nonetheless, Postman was on to something important. The expectation that everything be amusing does have a corrupting influence in areas where hard work needs to be done, attention needs to be paid, and the reward is not immediate. As Euclid said to his princely tutee, there is no royal road to geometry—some things are just difficult. (Twenty-five years ago, the principal of my daughter’s school thought learning the multiplication tables was unnecessary: Here was indeed a royal road, and it was the calculator. Parents rebelled.) Not surprisingly, Postman is horrified by educational television. The real lesson kids learn on Sesame Street, a particular bugbear of his, is not their numbers and letters but that learning ought to resemble a TV commercial: “Its use of cute puppets, celebrities, catchy tunes, and rapid-fire editing was certain to give pleasure to children and would therefore serve as adequate preparation for their entry into a fun-loving culture.” Compared to educational television, the classroom “begins to seem a stale and flat environment for learning.” Why can’t Susie’s math teacher be as funny as the Count von Count? Why does actual science have to be harder than watching The Voyage of the Mimi? (Postman would weep to see how TV is marketed to ever younger kids—Peppa Pig? Cocomelon?—even as researchers warn against screens for toddlers, to the guilty rage of overworked parents desperate for a break.) I’m not sure people are getting stupider, exactly, and if they are TV is surely only one of many causes, but something is badly off kilter when more than 60 percent of Americans can’t say who we fought against in World War II, but (trust me) have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Kardashians.

Postman’s jeremiad against TV seems rather quaint today, and not just because he was shouting into the wind and knew it. Compared to the 24/7 cacophony of social media, TV is like an illuminated manuscript. TV after all, was top down. Remember when there were just a handful of channels? When Walter Kronkite told us, “That’s the way it is” every night and people believed it? That made for a duller, more conformist world, but at least you weren’t constantly exhorted to “do your own research” in the far recesses of YouTube, where you would find proof that George Soros was really a Nazi, Covid was a hoax, and Hillary Clinton was organizing the mass rape of children.