Support for Koppel: ‘You’re Getting Sleepy’

“Let’s Keep Koppel in Perspective” (Opinion, March 17), concerning the disappearance of serious news from TV, clearly brings to mind embarrassing facts that most of us would rather ignore. Most contemporary commercial television is worse than a wasteland, and the enemy who has created it is us. We buy the products advertised in the inane commercials, which provides the cash flow that feeds the wasteland.

We allow our children and grandchildren to waste hundreds of hours a year in front of a hypnotic medium because it is a cheap baby-sitter. Our ability to focus attention on any one topic shrivels in response to the mind-numbing few moments that an average image stays on the screen.

It has been reported that within seconds of focusing attention on a television image, brain patterns in most individuals switch over to a mode similar to sleep. If one is disposed to believe in conspiracy theories concerning who or what is a declared enemy of America, one might want to start with what individuals and international corporations control major U.S. television media. Such an oversimplified explanation would be fitting tribute to the dumbing down of rational thought that commercial TV viewing encourages.

Ervin Taylor

Department of Anthropology

UC Riverside

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“Nightline” may be among the best of news programs on commercial TV. It is still shallow and poor. The program strives for controversy as entertainment. A typical “Nightline” debate consists of two people, who have no intention of either talking to each other or listening to each other, hysterically shouting their prepared pitches into the camera to finish them before the next commercial.

Public television has at least a dozen programs that provide more thoughtful attempts at honest disputation and information than this. They are much more worthy of our concerned support.

Murray Schacher

Mar Vista