It was not uncommon to hear from my elders growing up that television could rot your brain and you shouldn’t watch it too much. Quite a bit has changed since then but they weren’t wrong then and the sentiment if anything, has only become more accurate.
The problem of course is that these same people (primarily Boomers), are totally under the spell of the media they warned me about. Even then, the cartoons and video games they were warning me about in hindsight, are far less dangerous to perceptions of reality than are the news programs they were viewing every day of the week.
I was never in doubt when watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or playing Sonic the Hedgehog about what was and was not reality. There was basically zero danger of confusion when consuming such media. The danger was mostly to do with the unproductive nature of the activity in general. If I was allowed too much time in front of the screen, it would certainly sap my creative and productive energies and to some extent, this came true.
What about the nightly news broadcast though?
