There’s a lot of crappy books available, but that doesn’t mean it’s socially responsible to demonize the entire catalog of published literature.* If we go out on a limb to accept that the entire concept of television is directly correlated to its programming, it still doesn’t represent a damnable offense to personal growth.

The response I received when offering this thought was, “So what you’re saying is that when parents use TV as a babysitter instead of letting children play, it does nothing at all to ruin their creativity or their ability to think for themselves? They learn to just listen to what’s told to them instead of figure things out.”

I started, of course, by pointing out that their issue lies with poor parenting, not television watching. Placing blame on the instrument is like blaming knives for stabbing, or electric guitars for bad music. The deeper issue is rooted in their assumption that watching television as a child is responsible for social ills. I find zero evidence in the axiom that TV causes mental impotence, not even a personal anecdote. Growing up, I watched a lot of television shows, and Saturday morning cartoons were a staple of my weekends. I continued to watch television throughout my teen years, and on through high school and into my adult life. From what I can tell, this routine hasn’t affected me negatively in even any imaginable way, and I’d argue that it’s actually influenced me to develop more creative tendencies than I would have otherwise. I write stories and screenplays, DM for my Dungeons and Dragons games, make movies, and even draw (poorly). Those are widely regarded as creative endeavors, and presuming that they’re singularly confined to people who “fight the power” and rally against television viewing is pretentious, and disregards the portion of people who are functional without limiting their media intake.

Presented with this, a reply I got back was, “Possibly… but I think you’ll agree with me when I say that TV has gotten to a point where shows are so mass produced that many have little value at all to them. The only point has become to allow Americans to sit on their ass and veg.”

There are a lot of things wrong in that statement. First let’s start with the issue at hand, and that is the alleged worthlessness of TV. To begin we should separate the concepts of TV and TV shows, because even if TV shows reach toward the lowest common denominator, it’s ludicrous to conclude that TV as an avenue of expression is without value. Many television shows are smart, deal with mature situations, raise questions and present moral dilemmas that are both clever and intellectually stimulating; just as some books or movies are. Disregarding them, or (even further) denying their existence, is remarkably ignorant.

An even larger fallacy of logic is the blind certainty in an abstract, faceless “lazy American.”