Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.

Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the Now...this" mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.

I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville.

Television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations.

Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales.

Televizyon okuma kültürünü yok etmiştir. Halbuki zihinsel gelişim için okuma eyleminin yerini hiçbir eylem tutamaz. Seyirci olmak için hiçbir beceri gerekmez. "Televizyon okuma-yazma kültürünü genişletmez ve pekiştirmez. Tersine, okuma-yazma kültürüne saldırır. Televizyon, herhangi bir şeyin devamıysa eğer, on beşinci yüzyıldaki matbaanın değil, 19. Yüzyılın ortasında telgraf ile fotoğrafın başlattığı geleneğin devamıdır.

We rarely talk about television, only about what’s on television

Many decisions about the form and content of news programs are made on the basis of information about the viewer, the purpose of which is to keep the viewers watching so that they will be exposed to the commercials

With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.