Democracy dies when people turn on their TV sets

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Raising Kaine has an interesting post:

Only one of the 1,000 adults polled in the telephone survey could name all five freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment. Yet more than one in five (22 percent) could identify all five major characters in Matt Groening’s cartoon family.

Similarly, only 8 people in 100 could name at least three First Amendment freedoms. Four in 10 surveyed (40 percent) could name two of the three judges on the star-making show “American Idol,” and one in four (25 percent) could name all three.

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One thought on “Democracy dies when people turn on their TV sets”

  1. This has been a long standing premise, brilliant commenters have made the same observation.

    Al Gore gave a profound speech on this topic last year:

    http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/10/5/14301/6133

    Our founders knew all about the Roman Forum and the Agora in ancient Athens. They also understood quite well that in America, our public forum would be an ongoing conversation about democracy in which individual citizens would participate not only by speaking directly in the presence of others — but more commonly by communicating with their fellow citizens over great distances by means of the printed word. Thus they not only protected Freedom of Assembly as a basic right, they made a special point – in the First Amendment – of protecting the freedom of the printing press.

    Their world was dominated by the printed word. Just as the proverbial fish doesn’t know it lives in water, the United States in its first half century knew nothing but the world of print: the Bible, Thomas Paine’s fiery call to revolution, the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution , our laws, the Congressional Record, newspapers and books.

    Though they feared that a government might try to censor the printing press – as King George had done – they could not imagine that America’s public discourse would ever consist mainly of something other than words in print.

    And yet, as we meet here this morning, more than 40 years have passed since the majority of Americans received their news and information from the printed word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging readers and, for the most part, resisting the temptation to inflate their circulation numbers. Reading itself is in sharp decline, not only in our country but in most of the world. The Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by television.

    The Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by television. Who needs propaganda when you’ve got Fox News?

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