December 30, 2005
There's No Escaping TV
By Froma Harrop

That comatose figure before the television is me. And the images flickering in her face are not of the Berlin Philharmonic playing Bartok or documentaries on China. They are "The Planet's Funniest Animals" or reruns of "The Munsters."

I watch television, and I use it as a drug. Let no one call me a television snob. But let me also draw a line in the sandbox: Free humans should never have television forced on them. This is happening more and more, and it gives me the creeps. I know others who feel likewise.

There's no escaping TV. It's in the doctor's office, the gym and the jury-pool waiting room. It's in the bar, whether there's a game on or not. It's at the airport, where CNN holds everyone hostage. Note how the monitors are carefully placed around the boarding areas so that no seat is beyond their grasp.

Hospital waiting rooms are perpetually under television domination. The detainees may want to read, pray or listen to their own thoughts. They are not allowed to. Television must be watched.

Your writer recently wasted nearly an hour of her life in a hospital waiting room, controlled by CBS's "The Early Show." The program was a parade of promotions pretending to be feature stories.

There were in-depth "interviews" with the stars of the CBS show "How I Met Your Mother." Next was a news-impersonating item meant to stir interest in an upcoming "60 Minutes." Then came the "real'' commercials, for Listerine and Wal-Mart.

The hospital staff sent me to one of those smaller, inner waiting rooms, and for that I gave thanks. But there was no relief in the new quarters, where another TV blared out "Good Morning America" on ABC.

I recently had my car serviced. The customers' lounge had a television, and, of course, it was on. Fortunately, there was a children's playroom, separated from the waiting area by a glass door. The partition's purpose was to shield grown-ups from the noise of children. But I went there to avoid the noise of TV. I squeezed into a tiny yellow chair and read a magazine.

"Everywhere you go, the TV is in your face," says Frank Vespe, executive director of the TV-Turnoff Network. His group encourages Americans to watch less television. Putting in less screen time, Vespe says, will improve people's health and promote community. TV-Turnoff Network distributes fact sheets asserting that the average child spends more time in front of a television than in the classroom -- and that's not counting the hours playing video games or at the computer screen.

Mitch Altman also feels persecuted by the omnipresent television. He sees it in diners, taxicabs and wherever there is a captive audience. He's even seen televisions behind the urinals in a restaurant men's room. "Brilliant yet evil people decided that they can put a TV with advertisements right there," he said.

Unlike most of us, Altman did something about it -- and for profit. He invented a product called TV-B-Gone. It is a simple remote that fits in the palm of your hand. TV-B-Gone has one button, a power button. Point it at nearly any television set, and you can turn the thing off. (You can also turn the TV back on at the moment you're leaving the room.) For more information, go to www.tvbgone.com.

In a way, the TVs that blare at us wherever we go are worse than the telescreen in "1984," George Orwell's novel about totalitarian communism. In "1984," Big Brother may have been watching you, but you didn't have to watch him all day long.

The last straw for me was sitting over a cup of cappuccino at some cafe where the television never took a break. It was fixed on a news channel that played the same footage of a forest fire over and over again.

In this world of TiVo, Netflix and video iPods, we can supposedly watch exactly what we want, when we want it. That's civilization. But the society that lets television hijack public spaces -- that's tyranny. Television should always be our servant, never our master.

I fear it may be too late to save ourselves.

Copyright 2005 Creators Syndicate

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