-Caveat Lector-
The evil eye...the unaceptable face of TV
G L Playfair
WELCOME TO NOTEL
The town of Notel (population 2,500) is not to be found on
any map of Canada. Yet it does exist under another name, and it was there
that a unique study of the influence of televi-sion was carried out. The
story of how it came about began with the publication in 1972 of the US
Surgeon General's report (mentioned earlier), claimed by Surgeon General
Sternfeld himself to be the first to establish the causal link between TV
and antisocial behaviour. Psychologist Tannis MacBeth Williams of the
University of British Columbia thought, after reading the report, what a
pity it was that before-and-after studies of television's effects on whole
communities could no longer be done, for the simple reason that there were
no more 'before' communities of any size left in North America. Or so she
assumed.
A year later, she learned that she was wrong. There was a TV-free
community in Canada and it was quite accessible, though for some
geographical reason it had not yet been reached by either the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) or the American networks that most of
southern Canada had been receiving for many years. It sounded like just what
she wanted, but she had to move quickly: progress was on the way and Notel,
as she called the place, was due to be hooked up to CBC about a year later.
She moved quickly, locating 'control' towns in the area that were
similar except for their television consumption. One was receiving four
channels from Canada and the USA while the other could get only CRC. She
called them Multitel and Unite1 respectively. Then she and a team of
colleagues set out to find what differences, if any, there were between
residents of the three communities, using a wide range of standard
psychological tests on groups of both adults and children.
One of her first findings was completely unexpected:
Notel adults were a good deal brighter than those of the other two towns.
They were much better at creative problem-solving testsand even those
individuals who were unable to solve the tasks they were given would try for
much longer than Multitel or Unite1 people before giving up. As for the
children of Notel, they came out at the top of the three-town league when
they were given the Alternate Uses Task, a standard test in which subjects
are asked how many things they can do with something, like a sheet of
newspaper. This is a more revealing test than it may sound for it points to
what psychologists call ideational
fluency, or the ability to form ideas and mental images, and it is
considered to be a good indicator of overall creativity and ability to think
properly.
The Notel youngsters did not come out top in all tests, however. In
one they came last - that which tested them for aggression. It soon became
clear to Dr Williams that both the young and old of Notel were making much
better use of their brains than their counterparts in the other two
towns, but she could not prove that this was entirely due to their TV-free
lives, whatever she might have suspected. It could be that Notel had better
teachers, or there could be some obscure factor that she had not been able
to identify.
So, having at least established that there were significant differences
between the people of Notel and those of the other two towns, she went away
and came back two years later (by which time Notel had been receiving CBC
tele-vision for a year) to see if anything had changed.
It certainly had. The first thing she noticed was 'a dramatic drop'
in community participation. People were not going to public dances, parties
and suppers, club meetings, concerts, parades or bingo nights as they had
when there was no TV in their homes. This applied to all age levels, but was
'particularly striking' among the older people. As for the young ones, on
re-testing the same children she had tested two years previously for
aggression, Dr Williams was startled to find that instead of being bottom of
the league they were now top, thanks to a sharp increase in both verbal and
physical aggression. Moreover, this did not apply only to those who had been
aggressive by nature to start with, but to the whole lot.
Their reading skills had suffered, too. Whereas in the old days,
without TV, the poor readers had tended to try harder and practise,
acquisition rates of reading skills in Notel had slowed down to what had to
be considered normal in the tele-saturation age. Dr Williams suspected that
television was encouraging young people to accept ready-made ideas and thus
become 'mentally passive'. It also seemed to have led to a loss of
individual personality and the adoption of 'stereotype' attitudes, the word
meaning in this context somebody who is 'considered to typify or conform to
an unvarying pattern or manner, lacking any individuality' (American
Heritage Dictionary).
Television, she noted, tended to portray men and women as stereotypes with
the result that viewers' attitudes had become more standardised. This is a
good example of an effect of television that receives far less attention
than violence, but may be just as damaging to society in the long run.
Television naturally gives priority to negative and destructive stereotypes,
from strikers, pickets and football hooligans to political or religious
fanatics and extremists. These are good television. Once a stereotype is
established, individuals will conform to it in increasing numbers as a
result of the processes mentioned earlier
(subliminal image-absorption, post-hypnotic indirect suggestion) and behave
in the way in which they have come to be expected to behave. Thus a mass
stereotype is created, greatly helped by the 'mental passivity' induced by
looking at images. When reading or listening to radio we remain fully active
mental1y: as we mix the words we see or hear with the images they
inspire. When watching television we are mentally passive. On goes the set,
off goes the mind and in comes the stereotype to shape our future thoughts
and actions.
Dr Williams concluded that 'the net effects of North American
television on regular viewers, especially chil-dren, are negative.'
Why then, it will be asked, did earlier researchers reach other
conclusions? Wilbur Schramm, who did a before-and-after study in Canada a
few years after the Himmelweit study in Britain, reached conclusions similar
to hers: not much difference and nothing to get excited about. What was so
different about the Williams survey?
There are two answers. It was a good deal more thorough - Dr
Williams's final report runs to 446 pages of small print packed with
first-hand observations and measurements1 - and she and her predecessors
were not comparing the same things at all. Neither Schramm nor Himmelweit
could use control groups of lifelong viewers because in those days there
were none. The Notel study was unique because it was able to do this, and
also to record individual changes of personality and behaviour at first
hand.
It may never be possible to repeat the Notel study any- where outside the
Third World, but we can still compare the relative effects of light and
heavy viewing, which is the next best thing. Some recent studies of this
kind lend strong support to the view that television's net effect is
negative. In 1986, a group of psychologists at Murdoch University in Western
Australia assessed the imaginative abilities often- to thirteen-year-olds in
relation to the number of hours they spent every week watching television.
Unless there is a misprint in the report, some of them were glued to their
boxes for a staggering fifty hours a week, OY more. Not surprisingly, this
'heavy viewing' group scored lower on imaginative problem-solving tests than
either moderate or light viewers. Results, say the researchers, were
consist-ent with previous studies that had shown heavy viewing to have
suppressed younger children's imaginative play.2
The imagination is not all that suffers. Dr Larry Tuck-er, a
community health worker from Auburn, Alabama, looked at the mental and
physical health of 406 teenage boys in comparison with their viewing habits
and came to a very clear conclusion:
'The well-being of the boys was related significantly to the extent
of television viewing.' He reeled off a list of qualities he found in the
light viewing group: 'More physically fit, emotionally stable, sensitive,
imaginative, outgoing, physically active, self-controlled, intelligent,
moralistic, college-bound, church-oriented and self confident than their
counterparts, especially heavy tele-vision viewers.' Tucker also found the
light viewers less likely to be using drugs than moderate or especially
heavy
viewers.3
An even more forthright conclusion was reached by California's state
school superintendent after a large-scale survey in 1980 of the relative
academic achievement and viewing habits of some half a million pupils.
'Television', he stated, 'is not an asset and ought to be turned off.'4
Some of the best evidence in support of this statement has been put
together by writer Marie Winn in the course of her extensive research into
the effects of TV on children. Taking the year 1964 as a base, she looked at
the national average scores for the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) between
then and 1981. This test is taken by American high school students before
they go on to college, and it contains an oral section in which reasoning
skills can be evaluated. In 1964, when America's first generation raised on
TV was ready to take the SAT, the average score for this section was 478 out
of a maximum of 800. Twenty years later it was down to 424, a drop of II per
cent. Scores of 6oo or more are considered to show what an official calls 'a
higher order of reasoning skills', and there had been a corresponding drop
in this group from II to 7 per cent over the period from 1972 to 1982. What
made it likely that viewing habits had something to do with this was the
fact that the long and gradual decline in SAT scores matched
negatively as the medium itself. By suppressing 'inferential reasoning',
creative thought becomes impossible, and it could well be argued that a
society deprived of creative thought is in just as bad a way as one beset by
violent behaviour.6
Another way in which television affects everybody is almost too
obvious to mention, yet in the case of small children it may be the most
influential of all. This is what psychologists call displacement, which
simply means that if one is doing something, one is not doing something
else. There are people who claim to be able to watch TV and do something
else at the same time; in the survey by Taylor and Mullan mentioned earlier
one woman said she always had the set on while she was doing her ironing. I
am glad she does not do mine. For the most part. however, television
displaces a great deal that used to be thought necessary for the normal
development of a child from reading, playing, making things, talking to
others and generally finding out how the real world works.
What does it provide in return, other than peace and quiet for
parents? It offers totally artificial experience with which children cannot
interact except by pressing a button and switching to another equally
artificial experience. It presents a world in which value judgment is
impossible since everything and everybody in it are dished up in exactly the
same shape and size, adding yet more isolated images to the child's mental
store of unprocessed information. It teaches instant gratification, which
children learn to expect on demand in the real world. It displaces what
Marie Winn calls the 'special quality that distinguishes one family from
another' that largely depends on 'what a family does' (her emphasis). It
displaces all those little bits and pieces of shared experience that become
our most precious memo-
ries, turning the family into no more than what she calls 'a caretaking
institution'.'
It also makes you fat. Two paediatricians from Tufts University in
Boston have produced evidence that obesity and television viewing are
causally related. Going through the long and gradual increase in daily
viewing hours for the same age group, notably among the brighter students.5
Evidence like this alone does not prove that TV makes children
stupid. It could be that clever ones are less inclined to watch the thing,
or there could be a third factor that causes both academic brilliance and
allergy to the box. Statistical correlations are only of any value when
there is a cause-and-effect theory that has been demonstrated to go with
them. It is not enough to show that stupid youths watch more television.
What needs explaining is why they may be stupid because they watch it.
One of the most revealing experiments involving any aspect of
television was carried out in the early '80s by a Harvard University
research group who set out to com-pare ways in which children respond to
what they read in a book and what they see on the TV screen. They did this
by presenting exactly the same material to two groups of children: one group
simply had to sit and listen to somebody reading them a story while the
other group was shown a specially made film in which the same story was read
while illustrations from the book were shown on the screen. The real-life
story-teller and the TV narrator were the same person. In fact everything
was the same except the means by which information was conveyed.
Results, however, were not the same at all. When the two groups were
tested afterwards, the book group was found to have taken in a good deal
more of the story than the TV group. They could recall whole chunks of it
verbatim as well as several details, whereas the TV group showed that they
had absorbed the images to a far greater extent than the words, accepting
them as what the project director described as 'a self-contained experi-
ence' unrelated to their own real-life experience. Children in the book
group were also much better than those in the telly group when it came to
discussing the story. This experiment, which would be very easy to repeat,
is of special interest because it shows that it is not so much the content
of a TV programme that affects viewers data provided by the US National
Health and Examination
Survey, they discovered a correlation between the time adolescents spent in
front of the box and the probability of their developing obesity.8
Why this is so is not too hard to imagine. In a sampling of television
commercials, G. M. Blythe, director of the Oxford Health Education
Unit, found that 14 per cent promoted cake, biscuits, chocolate, potato
crisps and similar snacks, often accom-panied by such slogans as 'Are you
getting enough?' or 'If you like a lot of . . . ' Pearl Coleman, the
therapist mentioned earlier, has given a vivid account of the effect of a
'high television diet' on her well-nourished teenage son, whose normal
weekly viewing was a mere three to four hours a week. Then a friend went on
holiday and lent him his portable TV set.
On the first night of his unfamiliar high-TV diet, the boy
'announced from his bedroom in a loud voice that he was "peckish, hungry,
famished and starving" in that order'. As the week wore on, 'the week's
supply of fruit disappeared from the fruit bowls, refilled many times from
the larder, the dried fruit and nut jars . . . emptied rapidly. Boxes of
wholewheat cereal disappeared.' By the end of the week, the lad had gained
half a stone.9
Television seems likely to be causing far more damage than this.
Larry Tucker, the community worker mentioned earlier, was not the first to
notice a link between watching television and taking drugs. This was
discussed at length by Milton Shulman, who suggested five different reasons
why the sharp increase in illegal drug consumption that took place in the
USA, Canada and Britain during the '60s could be associated with TV-viewing
habits in those countries, all of which reached the 90 per cent home
ownership level at that time.
First was defiance of authority, actively encouraged by television
and all too easy to express by experimenting with illegal drugs such as
LSD-25 and cannabis. (LSD-25 was made illegal in 1966.)
Second was the question of frustrated rising expectations and the rejection
of the materialism tirelessly promoted on the TV screen from which
mind-altering substances offered the easiest escape.
Third, and perhaps the most important, was what Shulman called 'the dream
imperative', by which TV had created such an insatiable need for visual
stimulation that the tran-sition to drugs of the hallucinogenic kind was
only to be expected.
Fourth was what a Canadian sociologist called 'stimulus flooding and
psychological numbing', largely caused by TV-watching and leading in turn to
drug-taking as a kind of self-defence. Finally, Shulman noted the
similarities between the TV-watching experience and the narcotic vision. I
have already mentioned that the former can be a narcotic addiction in
itself, and it is well known that one addiction often leads to or is
replaced by another. 10
Was it just a coincidence that between 1964 and 1968, when America's
first TV generation came of age, the pro-portion of teenagers among those
arrested for drug offences doubled? On the evidence from some of the addicts
them-selves collected by Marie Winn, I would guess not. One described the
effects of cannabis as being like 'a TV show', another mentioned watching
acid-induced imagery 'like on a TV show', while a third showed some sign of
increased perceptivity by noting that one effect of drug-taking was to blur
the line between the real and the unreal, adding: 'Just like with TV'. It is
hardly surprising that drug-takers make use of such television-inspired
metaphors as turning on and tuning in, or that having done so both drug and
TV addicts 'drop out'. l1
Not only does television deprive viewers of more than it gives them, but
what it does give them is almost always something they either have already
or could have with the minimum of effort. How many devotees of the much
praised nature series The Living Planet know that the armadillo, the giant
ant-eater, and some of the fish, snakes and rodents used in early episodes
were borrowed for the occasion from a zoo, which was presumably open to the
public ? I also wonder what prompted David Attenborough, who made the
series, to say this when he left his job as head of BBC television
programming: 'One of the things that worries me, which you can't very well
say if you are a Director of Programmes, is that people watch television too
much.' He said it on television, too. Good for him. 13
An often heard defence of TV is that it encourages people to turn to
real pursuits such as sports, hobbies, or sciences like astronomy. Laurie
Taylor and Bob Mullan go so far as to claim that 'the whole area of ecology
and conservationism generally has been enormously helped by television'.14
The first argument is an unusual one - if the best thing television can do
is to encourage people to do something other than watch it, usually
something that peo-ple have been doing since long before TV was invented, I
can only wonder why there was any need to watch the thing in the first
place.
The second one is equally questionable. Television has certainly
jumped on to the green bandwagon, but it has merely hijacked a cause
pioneered over many years by such groups as Friends of the Earth,
Greenpeace, and the European Green parties, especially the West German one.
The result, says critic Fred Pearce, has been 'too many hurriedly produced
programmes, commissioned by peo-ple who have only the vaguest idea of what
they want, and made by producers and researchers with too little knowledge
and too little time to acquire it'. A film on the destruction of the Amazon
rainforest, for example, offered 'apocalyptic quotes and pictures of sunsets
in place of expla-nation of how destroying trees could warm the planet'. TV
is good at covering ecological disasters, he says, but unless it learns 'how
to present the bigger but less photogenic and less sudden disasters' the
result will be, as environmental consultant Chris Rose puts it, 'like
covering economics by only covering bank robberies'.15
There are always special cases, and television's is The Sky Ar Night. Who
would have dared imagine in the late 1940~ that the BBC's longest running
programme would be devoted entirely to astronomy, and would be presented by
the same man for something like half a century? Increased interest in this
science, according to Taylor and Mullan, was due 'almost single-handedly' to
Patrick Moore. Now, Moore is both a real astronomer of distinction and a
natural communicator whose programmes I remember
fondly. I cannot hear the opening bars of Sibelius's Pelllas et Me'lissande
without automatically looking heavenwards to see where the stars are. Yet
people have been doing this since the dawn of recorded history. Astronomy
has always been the most popular of the sciences, and amateurs have made
major contributions to it. Sir William Herschel, trained as a musician,
discovered the planet Uranus. Gra-ham Hosty, trained as a postman, found a
new star (Nova Sagitta 1977) with defective equipment worth about &IO. If
Patrick Moore has increased popular interest in astronomy in the TV age, so
much the better. Yet television did not invent it. Indeed, if television had
never been invented, astronomy might be even more popular than it is even
after forty years of The Sky at Night. There would be a lot more time for
star-gazing.
If something is to be criticised, it should be criticised at its
best as well as its worst. So I carried out an opinion poll among my
televiewing friends, who came up with two almost unanimous nominations for
television's finest hour: the news reports from Ethiopia that led to the
Band Aid phenomenon, and the film Cathy Come Home. This film, which I did
manage to see, was undoubtedly a masterpiece. Jeremy Sandford's story about
the plight of homeless people was researched at first hand, and Kenneth
Loach's direction transformed it into a film that was more realistic than
any documentary. Yet although it deservedly won several prizes and even led
to changes in the law, what good did it do in the long run? According to the
author himself, the number of people in hostels for the homeless went up
from 12,41 I in 1966 (the year in which the film was first shown) to 32,292
ten years later. Local authority waiting-lists had swelled over the same
period from IO,OOO to 28,000. In 1989 there were an estimated 75,000
homeless in London alone. Cathy had still not come home.
I did not see the material from Ethiopia that inspired the singer
Bob Geldof to 'get off my backside and do something about it,' as he put it
in the moving radio interview which I did hear. Indeed, I had no need to see
the images of famine and dying children since Geldof described them so
vividly, reminding me what a great visual medium radio can be. What he did
after getting off his backside was to raise some-thing like �50 million
almost overnight, and mobilise what seemed to be the entire worldwide
entertainment profession in an extraordinary feat of organisation that soon
had plane loads of food and supplies on their way to Ethiopia. Having myself
worked in the foreign aid business for four years, I could not fail to be
impressed.
However, three years later there was still famine in Ethiopia. The
first thing I learned when I went to work for the US Agency for
International Development in Brazil was the house motto: 'Give a man a fish,
and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for the
rest of his days.' The next thing I learned was that problems are not solved
by money alone. If they were, the developed world would not have any. They
are solved by removing the cause of the problem, which cannot be done
overnight even by revolutionary governments such as those of Cuba or
Nicaragua. To change anything it is sometimes necessary to change
everything.
To find out why people in Britain have nowhere to live or why
Ethiopians have nothing to eat involves tedious exami-nation of many
subjects, from political and social structures to local industry and
climate. This kind of enquiry does not make for good television. Cathy
wandering the streets and African children starving to death are much
better, and television, in the long run, did little for either. It merely
exploited them for its own purposes. The former BBC sports presenter David
Icke, who is also a national speaker for the Green Party, admits:
'We must move our approach in the media from the purely
environmental (symptoms) to the truly green (cause and effect)."'
He may find this difficult, for television typifies the kind of
technological dictatorship that Greens aim to abolish. It can indeed
transform society, as the Notel study showed, but it does not solve its
problems. It just transmutes them into yet more entertainment.
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Chapter 1
I The Times, 27 November 1982.
2 New York: William Morrow, 1978.
3
Chapter 2
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2 G. L. Playfair, 'The Influencing Machine'. Vole 3 (IO), 1980.
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5
Chapter 3
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J. Mander, Four Arguments for the Eliminalion of Television. New York:
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Chapter 4
1 P. G. Hepper, 'Fetal "soap" addiction'. The Lancet, II
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I77
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Chapter 8
I M. Shulman, The Ravenous Eye. London: Cassell, 1973,
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2 Ibid., pp. 248-g.
3 Evening Standard, I June 1g8g.
4 M. Bland & S. Mondesir, Promoting Yourself on Tele-
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Winn, op. cit., ch. 3.
P. A. Coleman, 'The Plug-in Drug'. Epoch 3 (I) pp. 2-7, 1980.
Chapter 5
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J. Braid, Neurypnology; or Ihe Rationale of Nervous Sleep.
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M. Shulman, The Ravenous Eye. London: Cassell, 1973,
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J. Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. New York:
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178
Chapter 6
I R. Greene, 'Subliminal Sweet Nothings', San Francisco
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6 L. H. Silverman et al., 'Effect of subliminal stimulation of
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7 F. P. Sandahl, 'The Defence Mechanism Test DMT as a
selection instrument . . .'Kungliga Krigsvetenskapsakademiens Handlingar och
Tidskrift 4, pp. 132-54, 1988.
A. Lowe, B. Hayward & T. Neuman, 'Defence mechanism and the prediction of
performance'. XXIV International Congress of Psychology, Sydney, Australia,
1988.
8 N. F. Dixon, Our Own Worst Enemy. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987, p.
79.
9 N. F. Dixon, 'Subliminal perception and parapsychology: points of
contact.' Parapsychology Review, May-June 1979, P. 4.
Chapter 7
I R. Clutterbuck, The Media and Political Violence. London:
Macmillan, 2nd ed., 1983, pp. 59-60. 2 P. Conrad, Television. The
Medium and its Manners. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982, p. 126.
3 Clutterbuck, op. cit., p. xxxv.
4 Ibid., p. xxiii. 5 Ibid., p. xxxiv.
6 Ibid., p. xl.
7 Ibid., p. I 14.
8 Ibid., p. 135.
I79
11Right to Reply, Channel 4, 7 November 1987. Quoted in Shulman, op. cit.,
p. 270. Ibid. Sunday Telegraph, I November 1987.
12 P. Rawlinson, A Price Too High. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989, pp.
254-5.
13 D. Rintels, quoted in J. Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of
Television.
19% P. 297.New York: William Morrow,
Mander, op. cit., p. 298.
E. J. Epstein, quoted in Mander, op. cit., p. 320.
Mander, op. cit., p. 315.
S. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses. London: Viking Penguin,
1988, p. 402.
The Times, g August 1989.
Chapter 9
I Daily Telegraph, g November 1984.
2 Evening Standard, rg January 1989.
180
10 G. Barlow & A. Hill (eds), Video Violence and Children. London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1985, p. 136. This one is not getting a free plug from me. Barlow
& Hill, op. cit., p. 149. Ibid., pp. 152-6.
11N. Hodgkinson, 'Videos inspire violent urge for nasty side of
life.' Sunday Times, 3 May 1987.
12 Eysenck & Nias, op. cit., pp. 29-32. Ibid., pp. 89-90.
13 Barlow & Hill, op. cit., p. 154.
14 Schorr, op. cit.
Chapter 10
I The Lancet 22 March 1986, p. 686.
2 The Lancet, 12 April 1986, p. 856. 3 The Lance& 3 May 1986, pp,
1036-T.
4 British MedicalJournal, re April 1986, p. 1073.
5 British Medical journal, II April 1987. pp. 954-7.
6 The Lancet, II July 1987, pp. 102-3.
181
(7)R. B. Ostroff et al., 'Adolescent suicides modeled after
television movie.' American Journal of Psychiatry 142 (8) P. 989, 1985.
8M. S. Gould & D. Shaffer, 'The impact of suicide in television movies:
Evidence of imitation.' New England journal of Medicine 315, pp. 69o-4,
1986.
9 R. B. Ostroff 8r J. H. Boyd, 'Television and suicide'. New EnglandJournal
of Medicine 316, pp. 876-7, 1987.
10 A. Schmidtke & H. Haefner, 'The transmission of suicid-al motivation and
suicidal behaviour by fictional models.' Nervenartzt 57 (9) pp. 502-10,
1986.
11 T. A. Holding, 'Suicide and "The Befrienders" '. British ]ouWJl of
Psychiatry 3. pp. 751-3, 1975. Sunday Express, 30 November 1986.
12 D. P. Phillips, 'The influence of suggestion on suicide
13 American Sociological Review 39, pp. 340-54, 1974. R. C. Kessler et al.,
'Clustering of teenage suicides after television news stories about suicide.
A reconsideration.' AmericanJournal of Psychiatry 145, pp. 137g-83, 1988.
14 D. P. Phillips, 'Motor vehicle fatalities increase just after publicized
suicide stories. ' Science 196, pp. 1464-5, 1977.
15 K. Lesyna & D. P. Phillips, 'Suicide and the media: Research and policy
implications'. In R. Diekstra (ed.) Preventive Strategies on Suicide. A WHO
State of the Art Publication, 1990 (in press). (Lists earlier papers by
Phillips.)
16 N. Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood. London: W. H. Allen, 1983,
pp. 108-12. Ibid., p. 104.
17 Eysenck & Nias, op. cit., p. 28.
Chapter II
I T. M. Williams, The Impact of Television. A Natural Experi-ment in
Three Communities. Orlando: Academic Press, 1986.
2 C. C. Peterson et al., 'Television viewing and imaginative problem
solving during preadolescence.' Journal of Genetic Psychology 147 (I) pp.
61-8, 1986.
3 L. A. Tucker, 'Television, teenagers and health.' Journal of Youth
and Adolescence 16 (5) pp. 415-26, 1987.
4 Quoted in M. Winn, The Plug-Zn Drug. Television, children and
thefamily. Revised edition. New York/Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin, 1985, p.
80.
5 Winn, op. cit., pp. 81-3. 6 Quoted in Winn, op. cit., pp. 85-6.
182
Chapter 12
C. Dunklev, quoted in L. Taylor & R. G. Mullan, Uninvited
Guests. The intimate secret3 ofj television and radio. London: Chatto &
Windus, 1986, p. 196.
M. Shulman, The Ravenous Eye. London: Cassell, 1973,
PP. 299-300.
Denver Post, 9 June 1974, quoted in M. Winn, The Plug-in
Drug. Television, children and the family. Revised edition.
New York/Harmondsworth: Viking Penguin, 1985, pp. 245-52.
Winn, op. cit., pp. 242-J. Ibid., p. 253. Ibid., ch. 18.
Daily Telegraph, 7 July 1989. Daily Telegraph, 24 June 1989. JAMA (Journal
of the American Medical Association), 7 October 1988, p. 1831.
Sunday Express, 24 March 1985.
Winn, op. cit., pp. 93-5.
N. Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood. London:
W. H. Allen, 1983. The Times, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, 2 August 1989, The
Times
Educational Supplement, 4 August 1989.
183
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