The wasteland revisited

I happened across this article (excerpt below) and was fascinated by the statistics that he presented. I hope you have access to the complete article. If I can find it on-line, I will publish a link to it. Why do I find it so fascinating? Because I am from that generation that grew up (through the age of 10) without a television in our house. I believe that because it is so pervasive, we tend to minimize the dangers presented by commercial television. Whoever pays the bills has the right to present their own agenda...

RENOWNED AUTHOR NORMAN MAILER CALLS FOR END TO COMMERCIAL TV; ENCOURAGES KIDS TO READ
New York, December 2—“I believe that television supported (and interrupted) by commercials has got to go,” PARADE Contributing Editor Norman Mailer writes in an original article on for this Sunday’s issue of PARADE magazine.
Mailer discusses what he would do to change America for the better and talks largely about the decline in reading among youths over the past few decades. From 1982 to 2002, there was a 25 percent decline in books read annually by teenagers and young adults. “If the desire to read diminishes, so does one’s ability to read,” Mailer writes. He says that commercial television is the culprit.
With the advent of television, it was hoped that the attention children gave to TV would improve their interest in reading. Mailer suggests that might have been the case if television consisted of uninterrupted narratives. But the nature of concentration has been altered by television commercials. “Even as adults, we have to learn to contain our annoyance when our thoughts are broken into,” Mailer says. “For a child, interruption to one’s concentration can prove as painful as a verbal rebuke, yet this is what we do to our children for hours everyday.”
On the major networks, the amount of time given to commercials increased by 36 percent from 1991 to 2003. During commercials, Mailer suggests that children “sit on the couch in a stupor, they eat and drink, and alarms are sounded through the nation. Our children are becoming obese, “ he says. “The rest of the world is getting into position to do far better than us with future economic conditions.”