Television as a medium is not so much to blame for the problems at hand as is the content. I enjoy watching television sometimes, and I am as guilty as the next person of becoming too immersed in it at the expense of more important matters, but this is a user-end problem, not a problem with the medium or the content of television.

My primary gripe with TV is that the content which is most heavily viewed--and therefore most prolifically emulated by the profit-hungry entrepreneurs which produce the content--is really of very low quality; it tends to emphasize sensationalism, sensuality, and eye candy at the expense of intelligence, insight, and creativity. People, very generally, seem to prefer passive, ersatz entertainment to material which is intellectually provocative and stimulating. That's not to say that such material isn't available--it certainly is. But people are putting crap on TV because there is a market for it, and viewers are at least as much to blame for creating that market as producers. If no-one wanted to watch crap, crap wouldn't be produced.

This naturally leads to the question of who decides what is crap or not, and that is a very individual matter. What I call crap might be extremely interesting to someone else, although I will say that I believe people might be surprised at the breadth of consensus on that topic, could it be scientifically assessed in a rigorous way.

The more closely one examines the issue, it seems to me that--especially if we are going to live in a society based on freedom of expression--the real problems with TV are with the viewers. Families, often out of a perceived necessity, sometimes allow the TV to do a lot of the work in raising their children, and then wonder why things have gone so awry by the early teenage years. So, while I would assert that much of the most popular material on TV is mindless crap, the ultimate responsibility for what is on the tube, as well as the responsibility for how TV is used, lies with the viewing audience.