The rich array of pejoratives for television (for example, "boob tube" and "chewing gum for the mind" and so forth) indicate a disdain held by many people for this medium.
Newton N. Minow spoke of the "vast wasteland" that was the television programming of the day in his
1961 speech. Complaints about the social influence of television have been heard from the U.S. justice system as investigators and prosecutors decry what they refer to as "the
CSI syndrome". They complain that, because of the popularity and considerable viewership of
CSI and its spin-offs, juries today expect to be "dazzled", and will acquit criminals of charges unless presented with impressive physical evidence, even when motive, testimony, and lack of alibi are presented by the prosecution.
Television has also been credited with changing the norms of social propriety, although the direction and value of this change are disputed.
Milton Shulman, writing about television in the 1960s, wrote that "TV
cartoons showed cows without udders and not even a pause was pregnant," and noted that on-air vulgarity was highly frowned upon. Shulman suggested that, even by the 1970s, television was shaping the ideas of propriety and appropriateness in the countries the medium blanketed. He asserted that, as a particularly "pervasive and ubiquitous" medium, television could create a comfortable familiarity with and acceptance of language and behavior once deemed socially unacceptable. Television, as well as influencing its viewers, evoked an imitative response from other competing media as they struggle to keep pace and retain viewer- or readership. According to a study published in 2008, conducted by John Robinson and Steven Martin from the
University of Maryland, people who are not satisfied with their lives spend 30% more time watching TV than satisfied people do. The research was conducted with 30,000 people during the period between 1975 and 2006. This contrasted with a previous study, which indicated that watching TV was the happiest time of the day for some people. Based on his study, Robinson commented that the pleasurable effects of television may be likened to an
addictive activity, producing "momentary pleasure but long-term misery and regret."
Psychological effects In 1989 and 1994, social psychologists
Douglas T. Kenrick and
Steven Neuberg with co-authors demonstrated experimentally that following
exposure to photographs or stories about desirable potential mates, human subjects decrease their ratings of commitment to their current partners. Citing the Kenrick and Neuberg studies, in 1994, evolutionary biologist
George C. Williams and psychiatrist
Randolph M. Nesse observed that television (and other
mass communications such as
films) were arousing
envy and causing lower feelings of commitment to spouses as a consequence of broadcasting the lives of most successful members of society (e.g.
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous) and of the entertainment and
advertising industry's hiring of physically attractive actors and actresses. Also citing the research by Kenrick and Neuberg and their co-authors, social psychologist
David Buss has also argued that the
evolutionary mismatch from constant exposure to images of physically attractive women in
advertising and entertainment likely cause lower levels of commitment by men to spouses and partners. In 1948, 1 percent of U.S. households owned at least one
television while 75 percent did by 1955, and by 1992, 60 percent of all U.S. households received
cable television subscriptions. In 1980, 1 percent of U.S. households owned at least one
videocassette recorder while 75 percent did by 1992. with the percentage of U.S. adults over the age of 25 who had never married rising to a record high of one-fifth by 2014 and the percentage of U.S. adults living without spouses or
partners rising to 42 percent by 2017. One theory says that when a person plays
video games or watches TV, the
basal ganglia portion of the
brain becomes very active and
dopamine is released. Some scientists believe that release of high amounts of dopamine reduces the amount of the
neurotransmitter available for control of movement, perception of pain and pleasure and formation of feelings. A study conducted by Herbert Krugman found that in television viewers, the right side of the brain is twice as active as the left side, which causes a state of
hypnosis. Research shows that watching television starting at a young age can profoundly affect children's development. These effects include obesity, language delays, and learning disabilities. Physical inactivity while viewing TV reduces necessary exercise and leads to over-eating. Language delays occur when a child does not interact with others. Children learn language best from live interaction with parents or other individuals. Resulting learning disabilities from over-watching TV include ADHD, concentration problems and even reduction of IQ. Children who watch too much television can thus have difficulties starting school because they are not interested in their teachers. Children should watch a maximum of 2 hours daily if any television. In his book
Bowling Alone,
Robert D. Putnam noted a decline of public engagement in local social and civic groups from the 1960s to the 1990s. He suggested that television and other technology that individualizes leisure time accounted for 25% of this change.
Health effects Studies in both children and adults have found an association between the number of hours of television watched and
obesity. A study found that watching television decreases the metabolic rate in children to below that found in children at rest. Author
John Steinbeck describes television watchers: :"I have observed the physical symptoms of television-looking on children as well as on adults. The mouth grows slack and the lips hang open; the eyes take on a hypnotized or doped look; the nose runs rather more than usual; the backbone turns to water and the fingers slowly and methodically pick the designs out of brocade furniture. Such is the appearance of semi-consciousness that one wonders how much of the 'message' of television is getting through to the brain." The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends that children under two years of age should not watch any television and children two and older should watch one to two hours at most. Children who watch more than four hours of television a day are more likely to become overweight. TV watching and other sedentary activities are associated with greater risk of heart attack,
diabetes,
cardiovascular disease, and death.
Alleged dangers Legislators, scientists and parents are debating the effects of
television violence on viewers, particularly youth. Fifty years of research on the impact of television on children's emotional and social development have not ended this debate. have claimed that the evidence clearly supports a causal relationship between media violence and societal violence. However, other authors note significant methodological problems with the literature and mismatch between increasing media violence and decreasing crime rates in the United States. A 2002 article in Scientific American suggested that compulsive television watching,
television addiction, was no different from any other
addiction, a finding backed up by reports of withdrawal symptoms among families forced by circumstance to cease watching. However, this view has not yet received widespread acceptance among all scholars, and "television addiction" is not a diagnoseable condition according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual -IV -TR. A longitudinal study in
New Zealand involving 1000 people (from childhood to 26 years of age) demonstrated that "television viewing in childhood and adolescence is associated with poor educational achievement by 12 years of age". The same paper noted that there was a significant negative association between time spent watching television per day as a child and educational attainment by age 26: the more time a child spent watching television at ages 5 to 15, the less likely they were to have a university degree by age 26. However, recent research (Schmidt et al., 2009) has indicated that, once other factors are controlled for, television viewing appears to have little to no impact on cognitive performance, contrary to previous thought. However, this study was limited to cognitive performance in childhood. Numerous studies have also examined the relationship between TV viewing and school grades. A study published in
Sexuality Research and Social Policy concluded that parental television involvement was associated with greater body satisfaction among adolescent girls, less sexual experience amongst both male and female adolescents, and that parental television involvement may influence self-esteem and body image, in part by increasing parent-child closeness. However, a more recent article by Christopher Ferguson, Benjamin Winegard, and Bo Winegard cautioned that the literature on media and body dissatisfaction is weaker and less consistent than often claimed and that media effects have been overemphasized. Similarly recent work by Laurence Steinbrerg and Kathryn Monahan has found that, using
propensity score matching to control for other variables, television viewing of sexual media had no impact on teen sexual behavior in a longitudinal analysis. Many studies have found little or no effect of television viewing on viewers (see Freedman, 2002). For example, a recent long-term outcome study of youth found no long-term relationship between watching violent television and youth violence or bullying. On July 26, 2000 the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry stated that "prolonged viewing of media violence can lead to emotional desensitization toward violence in real life." However, scholars have since analyzed several statements in this release, both about the number of studies conducted, and a comparison with medical effects, and found many errors.
Propaganda Television is used to promote commercial, social and political agendas. Public service announcements (including those paid for by governing bodies or politicians),
news and
current affairs,
television advertisements,
advertorials and
talk shows are used to influence public opinion. The Cultivation Hypothesis suggests that some viewers may begin to repeat questionable or even blatantly fictitious information gleaned from the media as if it were factual. Considerable debate remains, however, whether the Cultivation Hypothesis is well supported by scientific literature, however, the effectiveness of television for propaganda (including commercial advertising) is unsurpassed. The US military and State Department often
turn to media to broadcast into hostile territories or nations.
Political polarization Dick Cheney watching television on
9/11 While the effects of
television programs depend on what is actually
consumed, media theorist
Neil Postman argued in
Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) that the dominance of entertaining, but not informative programming, creates a politically ignorant society, undermining democracy: "Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least-informed people in the Western world." In a four-part documentary series released by
Frontline in 2007, former
Nightline anchor
Ted Koppel stated, "To the extent that we're now
judging journalism by the same standards that we apply to entertainment – in other words, give the public what it wants, not necessarily what it ought to hear, what it ought to see, what it needs, but what it wants – that may prove to be one of the greatest tragedies in the history of American journalism." Koppel also suggested that the decline in American journalism was made worse since the revocation of the
FCC fairness doctrine provisions during the
Reagan Administration, while in an interview with
Reason,
Larry King argued that the revocation of the
Zapple doctrine's
equal-time provisions in particular led to a decline in the
public discourse and the quality of candidates running in
U.S. elections. Following the
first presidential debate between
John F. Kennedy and
Richard Nixon during the
1960 U.S. presidential election (for which the equal-time rule was suspended), most television viewers thought Kennedy had won the debate while most radio listeners believed that Nixon had won.
Gallup polls in October 1960 showed Kennedy moving into a slight but consistent lead over Nixon after the candidates were in a statistical tie for most of August and September before the debates occurred. Kennedy would ultimately win the election with 49.7 percent of the popular vote to Nixon's 49.5 percent. Other polls revealed that more than half of all voters had been influenced by the debates and 6 percent alone claimed that the debates alone had decided their choice. Although the actual influence of television in these debates has been argued over time, recent studies by political scientist
James N. Druckman determined that the visually-based television may have allowed viewers to evaluate the candidates more on their image (including perceived personality traits) than radio which allowed the transmission of voice alone. Termed "
viewer-listener disagreement", this phenomenon may still affect the political scene of today. After the
presidential debates between
Hillary Clinton and
Donald Trump during the
2016 U.S. presidential election,
INSEAD economics professor Maria Guadalupe and
New York University (NYU)
Steinhardt School educational theatre professor Joe Salvatore adapted excerpts of the debate transcripts into a
one-act play titled
Her Opponent that replicated the language,
facial expressions,
gestures,
tone of voice, other
body language, and
nonverbal communication verbatim of Clinton and Trump during the debates by two fictional characters, but with the characters representing Clinton and Trump being
gender-flipped. Later performed
off-Broadway by fellow NYU Steinhardt School educational theatre professors Rachel Whorton and Daryl Embry for an open-ended run at the
Jerry Orbach Theater beginning in April 2017, the audience members that attended its premiere at the
Provincetown Playhouse the previous January were surveyed before the performance about the Clinton-Trump debates and after the performance about the gender-flipped adaptation of the debates, and the survey found that the Clinton supporters in the audience found Trump's debate performance not offensive and more effective when delivered by a woman and Clinton's debate performance to be offensive and less effective when delivered by a man. In
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), philosopher
David Hume observed that "
reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." Citing Hume, social psychologist
Jonathan Haidt argues that his research with anthropologist
Richard Shweder on
moral dumbfounding along with research about the
evolution of morality vindicates an
intuitionist model of
human moral reasoning, and Haidt cites verse 326 of the
Dhammapada where
Siddhārtha Gautama compares the
dual process nature of human moral reasoning
metaphorically to a
wild elephant and a
trainer as a preferable descriptive
analogy in comparison to a metaphor introduced by
Plato in
Phaedrus of a
charioteer and a pair of
horses. Along with differential psychologist
Dan P. McAdams, Haidt also argues that the
Big Five personality traits constitute the lowest in a three-tiered model of personality with the highest level being a personal
narrative identity constituted of events from
episodic memory with
moral developmental salience. As an example, Haidt cites how
Rolling Stones guitarist
Keith Richards recollects his experience as a
choirboy in
secondary school in his
autobiography as being formative in the development of Richards political views along what Haidt refers to as the "
authority/respect"
moral foundation. Along with political scientist Sam Abrams, Haidt argues that political elites in the United States became more polarized beginning in the 1990s as the
Greatest Generation and the
Silent Generation (fundamentally shaped by their living memories of
World War I,
World War II, and the
Korean War) were gradually replaced with
Baby boomers,
Generation Jones, and
Generation X (fundamentally shaped by their living memories of the
U.S. culture war of the
1960s and 1970s). Haidt argues that because of the difference in their life experience relevant to moral foundations, Baby boomers and Generation Jones may be more prone to what he calls "
Manichean thinking," and along with Abrams and
FIRE President
Greg Lukianoff, Haidt argues that changes made by
Newt Gingrich to the
parliamentary procedure of the
U.S. House of Representatives beginning in
1995 made the chamber more partisan. In 1923, 1 percent of U.S. households owned at least one
radio receiver which grew to a majority by 1931 and 75 percent did by 1937, while from 1948 to 1955, the percentage of U.S. households that owned at least one
television increased from 1 percent to 75 percent. Because of this, many Baby boomers, Generation Jones, and Generation X have never known a world without television, and unlike during World War II (1939–1945) when most U.S. households owned radios but did not have television (and while radio broadcasts were regulated under the
FCC Mayflower doctrine), during the
Vietnam War (1955–1975)
most U.S. households did own at least one television set. Also, unlike the
first half of the 20th century, protests of the
1960s civil rights movement (such as the
Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965) were televised, along with the
Stand in the Schoolhouse Door by
Alabama Governor George Wallace and the
Report to the American People on Civil Rights by President Kennedy in 1963 (which led to the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
long-term political realignment of the Southern United States as a whole to the
Republican Party in turn), the
police brutality and the
urban race rioting during the latter half of the decade, the multi-decade surge in the
U.S. homicide rate (that increased by a factor of 2.5 between 1957 and 1980), rates of
rape,
assault, robbery, theft, and other crime that began in the mid-1960s and did not return to comparable levels until the mid-to-late
1990s (after experiencing declining homicide rates during the
Great Depression, World War II, and during the
initial Cold War), and television was used increasingly used for
negative campaigning and
dog-whistle attack ads on
wedge issues (such as the
Daisy advertisement in
1964 and the
Willie Horton advertisement in
1988). In 1992, 60 percent of U.S. households held
cable television subscriptions in the United States, In
1976, only 27 percent of U.S. voters lived in landslide counties, which increased to 39 percent by
1992. Nearly half of U.S. voters resided in counties that voted for
George W. Bush or
John Kerry by 20 percentage points or more in
2004. In
2008, 48 percent of U.S. voters lived in such counties, which increased to 50 percent in
2012 and increased further to 61 percent in
2016.
At the same time, the 2020 U.S. presidential election marked the ninth consecutive presidential election where the victorious
major party nominee did not win a
popular vote majority by a double-digit margin over the losing major party nominee(s), continuing the longest sequence of such presidential elections in U.S. history that began in 1988 and in
2016 eclipsed the previous longest sequences from
1836 through
1860 and from
1876 through
1900. In contrast, in 14 of the 17 U.S. presidential elections from
1920 through
1984 (or approximately 82 percent) the victorious candidate received more than 50 percent of the vote (with
1948, 1960, and
1968 excepted) while in 10 of the 17 elections (or approximately 59 percent) the victorious candidate received a majority of the popular vote by a double-digit margin (1920,
1924,
1928,
1932,
1936,
1952,
1956, 1964,
1972, and 1984). == Gender and television ==