Television Today: A Primer of Critical Thinking, Censorship, Social Justice, and Fake News in American Popular Culture

Tuning in to media literacy as a modern survival skill. Because all of human life ends up on television today, as it did fifty years ago, the principles of critical thinking need to be taught to each young generation because fake news never dies. This lively and historic pop-culture guide teaching how to decode television was written when a pre-Watergate Richard Nixon was president, and republished during the 2020 election disruption of media. It affirms that timeless principles of critical thinking do not change, nor does human behavior. This 1970 book is an artifact of its times which were then—and now. Nixon can be a synonym for Trump. The necessity of critical thinking for one’s self-defense never goes away. 

    This book suggests that the goal for a person’s liberation from authoritarians and  fundamentalists through education is the ability to interpret, understand, and survive the towering babble of people, media, politics, religion, art, and society. In the 1960s, high schools and universities were the crucible of revolution and change around war, race, and gender. That fact angered conservative politicians who have continued with purpose to systematically de-fund education from kindergarten to college, and have allowed student debt to rise to discouraging levels, because American citizens schooled in critical thinking are a voting population of logic, resistance, and change that questions their rhetoric, and threatens their regime, riches, religion, and reasoning.

    In his foreword, the author explains: “I wrote this book for teen-age students while teaching American literature on one of those progressive university campuses in the 1960s when film-crazy and politically active students enthusiastically diverted arts-and-ideas discussions of classic literary works into topical discussions of current film and media. They impelled me to reinvent my ‘Literary Interpretation’ classes within the department of English by adding film/television as a fourth genre to fiction, poetry, and drama as a relevant way to teach principles of critical thinking freshened via the popular culture of movie and television screens. In the half-century since, the names of people and titles of programs have changed, but the principles of critical thinking remain the same.”