When I was a little boy, a teenager, they would say, ‘Cassius Clay is going to be on television!’ I didn’t have a television. I’d run for miles to find a television. And he’d say: ‘I’m pretty! I’m beautiful.’ And everybody would look: He’s pretty! He’s beautiful! Oh what a wonderful treat his was ... I am still in awe of him. George Foreman
Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like at this moment to announce that I will be retiring from this program in two weeks’ time because of poor ratings. Since this show is the only thing I have going for me in my life I have decided to kill myself. I’m going to blow my brains out right on this program a week from today. Network 1976 Network starring Faye Dunaway & Peter Finch & William Holden & Robert Duvall & Wesley Addy & Ned Beatty & Beatrice Straight & Jordan Charney & William Prince & Lane Smith & Marlene Warfield & Conchata Ferrell et al, director Sidney Lumet
I want counter-culture. I want anti-establishment. ibid.
We’re not a respectable network; we’re a whorehouse network. And we have to take whatever we can get. ibid.
I’ll tell you what happened – I just ran out of bullshit. Am I still on the air? I don’t know any other way to say it other than I just ran out of Bullshit. Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living. And if we can’t think of any reasons of our own we have the God bullshit. [inaudible] ... going through all this pointless pain and humiliation and decay, so they’d better be someone somewhere who does know – that’s the God bullshit. ibid.
Do you want to be an angry prophet denouncing the hypocrisy of our time? ibid.
We’re in a lot of trouble ... because you people and sixty-two million other Americans are listening to me right now. Because less than 3% of you people read books. Because less than 15% of you read newspapers. Because the only truth you know is what you get over of this tube. Right now there is a whole – an entire – generation that never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube! This tube is the gospel! The ultimate revelation! This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers. This tube is the most awesome god-damned force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people ... And when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome god-damned propaganda for us in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be paid to the truth on this network! So you listen to me. Listen to me. Television is not the truth. Television is a god-damned amusement park; television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troop of acrobats, story-tellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion-tamers and football players – we’re in the boredom-killing business. So if you want the truth go to God. Go to your gurus. Go to yourselves! Because that’s the only place you’re ever going to find any real truth. But, man, you’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear. We’ll lie like hell ... We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night all ages, colors, creeds, where are you now? You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like a tube. You eat like a tube. You raise your children like a tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name: you people are the reality. We are the illusion. ibid.
You are television incarnate, Diana. Indifferent to suffering. Insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death. All the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of Time & Space into split seconds, instant replays. You are madness, Diana. Virulent madness. And everything you touch dies with you. But not me. Not as long as I can feel pleasure, pain. And love. ibid.
If Life were the Jeremy Kyle Show, we’d be grilling God on stage as the abusive parent. esias, Hi, I’m Elohim: The Trouble With God
The bottom line is that the government is getting what they have ordered. They do not want your children to be educated. They do not want you to think too much. That is why our country and our world has become so proliferated with entertainments, mass media, television shows, amusement parks, drugs, alcohol and every kind of entertainment to keep the human mind entertained, so that you don’t get in the way of important people by doing too much thinking. You had better wake up and understand that there are people who are guiding your life and you don’t even know it. mJordan Maxwell, Matrix of Power
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book. Groucho Marx
All I wanted to do was go back inside to the library and read a book. I used to spend all my time reading books, or watching television. It was safe. Nobody ever was hurt or teased or looked stupid while reading books or watching television. Kathryn Magendie, Sweetie
I don’t think there’s any information to be gotten from television. David Mamet
The strange thing about television is that it doesn’t tell you everything. It shows you everything about life on Earth, but the true mysteries remain. Perhaps it’s in the nature of television. Just waves in space. The Man Who Fell to Earth 1976 starring David Bowie & Rip Torn & Candy Clark & Buck Henry & Bernie Casey & Tony Mascia & Rick Riccardo et al, director Nicolas Roeg, shop lady to Bowie opening line
I believe he means television, sir. That particular form of entertainment did not last much beyond the year 2040. Star Trek: The Next Generation s1e26: The Neutral Zone, Data to Riker
I know that after Vietnam the British government had a very close look at the effect that the presence of television cameras [had] on the battlefield, and the free reporting – the newspaper reporting – of a war could have on the aims of the government in that war. Phillip Knightley, author The First Casualty
War has been a staple of British television since, well since the war. When TV Goes to War, BBC 2012
What’s the dividing line between television drama and historical fact? ibid.
War and television always have had an explosive relationship. ibid.
The birth of television was directly linked to the war effort. ibid.
The War Game blurred the line between documentary and journal. ibid.
In ’70s television the war was never over. ibid.
By 1970 there are over sixteen million: TV will play a defining role in shaping a new era. America: The Story of the US: Millennium, History 2010
1970: There’s been thousands of anti-Vietnam war protests. Kent State University Ohio: the National Guard are ordered in to control five hundred protesting students. Television is here watching. Four students are shot dead. ibid.
Twice as many bombs were dropped than in the whole of World War II. Over seven million tons. But what sticks in American minds are the pictures they see on their TV sets. ibid.
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America – not the battlefields of Vietnam. Marshall McLuhan, cited Montreal Gazette 16th May 1975
The Medium is the Message. Marshall McLuhan
Any medium – be it radio or be it the wheel – tends to create a completely new human environment. Marshall McLuhan, interview not transmitted BBC 1965
As American involvement in Vietnam grew, reporters and camera crews were sent into the field to produce the stories and images that television needed every day. Mark Daniels, Enemy Image, 2005
Citizen soldiers replace generals as the face of war. ibid.
And for journalists travelling with the troops, soldiers became characters, and the daily trials of war became a drama. ibid.
If the reporter’s obligation is to bring us all the truths of war, the first truth is tearing of flesh. ibid.
Johnson orchestrated his own media campaign of patriotism and optimism on the nation’s television screens. His message – victory is in sight. ibid.
In all 7,500,000 tons of bombs fell on Vietnam, three times the total bomb tonnage that had fallen in World War II. ibid.
Britain’s most vividly attired man of the early ’70s – Peter Wyngarde, better known as TV’s rakish adventurer Jason King. Dominic Sandbrook, The 70s I: Get It On 70-72 ***** BBC 2013
In the mid-eighties Spitting Image attracted some fifteen million viewers. Dominic Sandbrook: Let Us Entertain You II: In With the Old
The Prisoner was the ultimate cult hit: a TV series about a secret agent who is kidnapped and held captive in the mysterious village ... He is Number 6, and from the village there is no escape: ‘I am not a number; I am a free man.’ Dominic Sandbrook: Let Us Entertain You IV: Me, Myself & I