In preparation for James Corbett’s upcoming course on The History of the Media, The Corbett Report Subscriber is presenting a three-part series on the past, present and future of mass media. Last week we examined How the First Media Moguls Shaped History. This week we examine the history of psychological research into mass media’s effects on the public mind and explore the particular properties of the television set that render its audience susceptible to its lies.

You can tell a lot about an item by the nicknames we give it. So what do our nicknames for the television tell us about that device?

“The idiot box.”

“The boob tube.”

“The tell-lie-vision.”

It doesn’t take a super sleuth to puzzle this one out. From the very inception of commercial television in the 1950s—when the phrase “boob tube” was first coined to lament the dumbing-down effect that the device was presumed to be having on the populace—to the zenith of the TV’s cultural hegemony in the late 20th century, fears about the television’s ability to create zombified couch potatoes out of its passive audience have been ever-present.

It’s no coincidence that the 2006 comedy (or should that be docudrama?), Idiocracy, introduces its viewers to the eponymous future idiocracy—in which the intelligence of the population has declined to shockingly low levels—by showing a junk food-ingesting “lawyer” in the midst of enjoying the hit television show of the year 2505, Ow! My Balls! It’s also no coincidence that the same movie sees protagonist Private Joe Bauers formulating a plan for heading off the development of this idiocracy by encouraging people to read books rather than watch TV.

We all know the trope: television makes you dumb, lazy and passive, and (by implication) it renders you susceptible to the lies and manipulations of those who create the TV programming. But is it true?

As it turns out, not only are concerns about the content and the presentation of TV programming well-founded, but there is an even darker side to the device than is commonly realized. There is ample research to suggest that the TV is actually designed to send you into a trance-like state that lowers your cognitive defences against the lies the TV networks (and their corporate owners) are attempting to push on their docile audience.

Would you like to know more? Then don’t miss this week’s edition of The Corbett Report Subscriber, where James documents the hypnotic effects of the television set and the ways that admen and social engineers have made use of those effects to manipulate the public. Also, Corbett Report members can log in here for discounts on my upcoming course at Renegade University and a coupon code for 25% off Corbett Report DVDs at the new New World Next Week shop.

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