I think the part of media that romanticizes criminal behaviour, things that a person will say against women, profanity, being gangster, having multiple children with multiple men and women and not wanting to is prevalent. When you look at the majority of shows on television they placate that kind of behaviour. Bill Cosby
4If you watch kids looking at something on television, even something that’s produced for them and is supposed to be funny, what you’ll notice is that they don’t laugh. Bill Cosby
In the US the ’50s and ’60s marked the documentary’s golden age, especially at CBS, where pioneering television journalist Edward R Murrow, immortalised in George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck, produced such landmark investigations as the CBS Reports programme Hunger in America. Naomi Wolf
I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent. Steve Jobs
What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust. Salvador Dali
If those in charge of our society – politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television – can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves. Howard Zinn
Thank God we’re living in a country where the sky’s the limit, the stores are open late and you can shop in bed thanks to television. Joan Rivers
Everyone knows that when you look at a television ad, you do not expect to get information. You expect to see delusion and imagery. Noam Chomsky
If you’re working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option. Noam Chomsky
If a Martian came down to Earth and watched television, he’d come to conclusion that all the world’s society is based on Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. He’d be amazed that our society hasn’t collapsed. Michio Kaku
I cannot be alone in being pretty nauseated by Red Nose Day, or at least its television manifestation. Do I think that wretchedly poor children in Africa should get food and life-saving drugs? Of course. Do I want to be hectored into contributing by celebrities who earn more in a 10-minute slot than many of these families get in a year? Nope. Simon Hoggart
Television’s perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don’t have to concentrate. You don’t have to react. You don’t have to remember. You don’t miss your brain because you don’t need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man’s nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn’t got the price of a television set. Raymond Chandler
Watching too much TV can triple our hunger for more possessions, while reducing our personal contentment by about 5% for every hour a day we watch. David Niven
Gore Vidal, for instance, once languidly told me that one should never miss a chance either to have sex or to appear on television. My efforts to live up to this maxim have mainly resulted in my passing many unglamorous hours on off-peak cable TV. It was actually Vidal’s great foe William F Buckley who launched my part-time television career, by inviting me on to Firing Line when I was still quite young, and giving me one of the American Right’s less towering intellects as my foil. The response to the show made my day, and then my week. Yet almost every time I go to a TV studio, I feel faintly guilty. This is pre-eminently the ‘soft’ world of dream and illusion and ‘perception’: it has only a surrogate relationship to the ‘hard’ world of printed words and written-down concepts to which I’ve tried to dedicate my life, and that surrogate relationship, while it, too, may be ‘verbal’ consists of being glib rather than fluent, fast rather than quick, sharp rather than pointed. It means revelling in the fact that I have a meretricious, want-it-both-ways side. My only excuse is to say that at least I do not pretend that this is not so. Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
First radio, then television, have assaulted and overturned the privacy of the home, the real American privacy, which permitted the development of a higher and more independent life within democratic society. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind p58
We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late. Edward R Murrow
Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shockwaves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen. Norman Mailer
Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have. Richard Salent, former president CBS News
We are going to impose our agenda on the coverage by dealing with issues and subjects that we choose to deal with. Richard M Cohen, senior producer CBS political news
Any good broadcast, not just an Olympic broadcast, should have texture to it. It should have information, should have some history, should have something that’s offbeat, quirky, humorous, and where called for it, should have journalism, and judiciously it should also have commentary. That’s my ideal. Bob Costas
Why should people go out and pay to see bad movies when they can stay at home and see bad television for nothing? Sam Goldwyn, cited Observer 9th September 1956
I want that television set turned on right now! One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 1975 ***** starring Jack Nicholson & Louise Fletcher & William Redfield & Brad Dourif & Sydney Lassick & Danny DeVito & Christopher Lloyd & Will Sampson & Dean Brooks & William Duell & Vincent Schiavelli et al, director Milos Forman, Randle to Ratched
‘The TV was the centre of the house. I don’t remember a time without TV.’ The Sixties: Television Comes of Age, Tom Hanks, Yesterday 2014
The magic of Carol Burnett. ibid. commentator
There was no denying the shift in attitudes towards sex, towards race relations, towards politics. ibid.
‘Television changed absolutely everything.’ ibid. Tom Hanks
Welcome to the sixties ... TV went from blitzed out black and white to living colour. It was Alright in the 1960s, Channel 4 2015
BBC live TV with ringing telephones ... Mainly Millicent 1964 with Roger Moore (Millicent trips) ... The Charlie Drake Show 1961 (knocked out by prop) ... Cigarette adverts ... Tomorrow’s World (live bullets fired at man) ... Naturist documentary ... Woody Allen v Kangaroo ... Child of the Year Competition ... The Bonzos (Minstrels) ... The Ravers (yoof documentary) ... Dixon of Dock Green (racism) ... Department S (sexism) ... The Saint (sexist spanking & racism) ... Emergency Ward 10 1964 (first inter-racial kiss) ... Mainly for Men 1969 (late night) ... Scott on Birds 1964. ibid.
Welcome to the 1970s – now seen as the decade that tastes forgot ... All this happened on television. It Was Alright in the 1970s, Channel 4 2014
In 1970 protesters targeted the Miss World contest in London. ibid.
‘I want to be raped!’ ibid. BBC Butterflies
Nowhere did we smoke more it would seem than on television. ibid.
Only one of three TV channels ... A time before political correctness. It Was Alright in the 1970s II
What passed for seventies entertainment. ibid.
Where were the liberated female role models on TV? ibid.
Ford’s ‘she doesn’t know ...’ [ad nauseam] TV ad. ibid.
The Man Alive Report: Public Disgrace 1976 ... ‘Gay shirts ... I have in every way leaned backwards to be absolutely sure of my facts.’ ibid. rozzer