Television (Broadcast TV)

Through the 1950s television moved from a curiosity to the box in the corner of almost every American living room, and the arguments about what it was doing to children, to families and to the nation's moral fibre followed it in. The most famous line of the era came from Newton Minow, the young chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (the US broadcasting regulator), who told an assembly of broadcasters in May 1961 that what they were putting on air was "a vast wasteland." The phrase stuck. Parents worried that their children were being "mesmerised" by adult Westerns and crime dramas. Doctors warned about eye strain, and the cathode-ray tubes of the day were square enough to give the era a bit of slang — "square eyes," what you got from watching too much. In 1961 Wilbur Schramm's Stanford study Television in the Lives of Our Children reported that more than half of children were regularly watching violent programming made for grown-ups. The Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency — the same body that had hauled in the comic-book industry — held televised hearings on TV violence in the mid-1950s. Fredric Wertham, the psychiatrist behind the comic panic, started writing a sequel aimed at television called The War on Children. (He never finished it.) In 1969, at the request of Senator John Pastore, the US Surgeon General convened a task force on television and violence, which reported back in 1972. Much later the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended zero screen time for under-twos — a rule eventually relaxed in 2016 as reality caught up with it.

All true, and all incomplete. The same medium that had parents wringing their hands also gave the country Edward R. Murrow's March 1954 See It Now broadcast, the one that went at Senator Joseph McCarthy and his communist witch-hunts and helped end them. Television was doing moral work at the same time it was being blamed for moral decay, which is the usual state of affairs with a new medium, and which makes any simple television-corrupts story fall apart the moment you look at it.