10.
There is a crisis of literacy in this country. One study
estimates that some 30 million adult Americans are "functionally
illiterate" and cannot read or write well enough
to answer a want ad or understand the instructions on
a medicine bottle.
11.
 Literacy
may not be an inalienable
human right, but it is one that the highly literate
Founding Fathers might not have found unreasonable or
even unattainable. We are not only not attaining
it as a nation, statistically speaking, but we are falling
further and further short of attaining it. And,
while I would not be so
simplistic as to suggest that television is the
cause, I believe it contributes and is an influence.
12.
Everything about this nation -- the structure of the
society, its forms of family organization, its economy,
its place in the world -- has become more complex, not
less. Yet its dominating communications instrument,
its principal form of national linkage,
is one that sells neat
resolutions to human problems that usually have
no neat
resolutions. It
is all symbolized in my mind by the hugely successful
art form that television has made central to the culture,
the 30-second commercial: the tiny drama of the earnest
housewife who finds happiness in choosing the right
toothpaste.
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