Benjamin

“[M]ost of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. (68).”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. (92)”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“[It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. (87)”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business