On BookTelevision, incidentally, we are plotting the sweetest revenge: a show called Everyone’s a Critic, which will regularly analyze and criticize what the critics have written – not just about TV, but books too, restaurants, cars, goalies, the House of Commons. It will be a show about critical writing, a show that ought at least to soothe the savage soul of the critic by letting him know someone cares about what he has to say.

Quotes on screen

“I don’t own a television.”
Dr. John Meisel – Chairman, Canadian Radio-Television Commission,
1979–83

“Television is the literature of the illiterate, the culture of the lowbrow, the wealth of the poor, the privilege of the underprivileged, the exclusive club of the excluded masses.”
Lee Loevinger – Commissioner, US Federal Communications Commission,
1963–68

“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 conversation.”
Neil Postman – author of The End of Education

“The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.”
Andrew Ross – Journalist

“It is destroying our entire political, educational, social, institutional life. TV will dissolve the entire fabric of society in a short time.”
Marshall McLuhan – Media Scholar/Critic

“Don’t you wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence? There’s one marked “Brightness,” but it doesn’t work.”
Gallagher – Comedian

“Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.”
Malcolm Muggeridge – Journalist