How to Talk Back to Your Television Set. This item is unavailable.How to Talk Back to Your Television Set

In the United States, where more than 95 percent of all homes have at least one television set, the average TV is on nearly six hours each day. By the age of five, a child normally has spent more hours watching television than he will have spent in college classrooms. “Television,” Johnson writes, “is one of the most powerful forces man has ever unleashed upon himself.” In this book, he inquiries into television’s performance and he finds it dangerously inadequate. Unlike most critics of the medium, he also offers some tough-minded proposals for reform, recalling the principle with which broadcasting in the U.S. began. The broadcasting industry only uses the airwaves as a public trust. In recent years, Johnson believes, this fundamental concept has been very nearly abandoned, with tragic results. He discusses the growing concentration of ownership in broadcasting (and in the print media) and he describes industry censorship at work. He also examines the values that television promotes and cites the extraordinary amount of violence that appears on American television, and its alarming effect on national life. At the center of How to Talk Back to Your Television Set are concrete proposals for change. Commissioner Johnson suggests new ways in which government, industry, and the viewing public can interact to better the quality of television. And he advises the individual citizen on how to teach those in responsible positions, in a chapter called “What You Can Do to Improve TV.” This is an intense and timely book. Its subject is everywhere: television daily shapes our sense of one another and of the world. For the viewer discontented with television, the habitual response has been a sense of hopelessness but Johnson suggests that change is not only possible but essential. Nicholas Johnson is best known for his controversial term as a member of the Federal Communications Commission (1966-1973). He currently teaches in the College of Law at the University of Iowa.