Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching.

. . . Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.

What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.

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.

When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision.

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

Technology always has unforeseen consequences, and it is not always clear, at the beginning, who or what will win, and who or what will lose.