Harry Shearer

Television is an enormously effective and valuable tool. This is common knowledge--politicians know it, teachers know it, priests know it, and advertisers know it. “Tube-tied,” while thoughtful, stopped short of assailing the true danger that surrounds the tube--which is not the tube but the boob.

Unless our educators begin to encourage intellectual challenge, the tube will win in the battle for our attention and the spoils will be illiterate, mindless, consumer hypnotism. This country is founded on debate--free-minded, intellectual, person-to-person debate.

The danger of the tube is that it has gained a kind of authority. If something is on television, it must be real, or right, or OK, or acceptable, or good for you. What is vital, and here I agree with Shearer, is not that we stop watching, nor that we start regulating, but that we teach people to challenge what they see. The harder someone is to argue with, the more likely they are free.

ERICK WEISS

Los Angeles