Alice in Videoland: Looking Through a Rectangular TV Window into an Alternative Universe

Sometimes, and not often enough, insights, understandings and new ideas just pop into your mind, unbidden. How? I have no idea but as the brain apparently operates somewhere on the quantum level, figuring out how it happens I suspect is and always will be impossible. Somehow, watching television interferes with this process, specifically the bit (or is it bits?) of the brain that can distinguish between fantasy and reality.'

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Strategies for Revolutionaries: Break the TV Addiction

Numerous institutions, traditions and prejudices function as modes of oppression and prevent us from collectively addressing the tragedy of the commons. Acts of legislation arbitrarily prohibit and criminalize our actions, schools indoctrinate us with a tacit deference to authority, and our interpersonal relationships are prone to crystalizing vicious spirals of interaction. Taken as a whole, they manufacture a society in which worldviews are intentionally constrained, warped, and self-defeating. In a world where soldiers laugh after murdering children, a president brands war as peace, a ‘recovered hero’ resurrects his father to try to sell shoes, and crucial scientific reviews are hollow whitewashes, we’re obviously in need of a new set of values. And one the most effective means of preventing us from collectively making these changes is our addiction to TV.'

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Hoax Broadcast Causes Panic in Georgia

Panic gripped Georgia after a pro-government television station broadcast a fake report that Russian tanks had entered the capital Tbilisi.

The fake report, which was broadcast on Saturday by the pro-government station Imedi TV, said that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had been killed in the Russian invasion.

Imedi TV later stated that the aim of the broadcast was to show the "real threat" of how events may unfold.'

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Ahmadinejad to Give Xmas Message On UK TV

Iran's President is to deliver a Christmas Day message on Britain's Channel 4 television in counterpoint to Queen Elizabeth's speech.

Following in the tradition of the channel, the public-service British television broadcaster will air an annual alternative to the Queen's Christmas speech.

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Three In Four Don't Trust Television

Only one in four of the population say they trust television, a year on from a series of rigged competition scandals and editorial deception.

Research by consultancy Deloitte shows that over a third of the public do not trust television, with a further third expressing no view either way, while only two per cent "strongly agree" that they trust British TV.
Last year saw a spate of scandals on some of the BBC’s biggest charity shows, Channel 4’s Richard and Judy, ITV’s Saturday night shows and a mis-leading BBC1 clip of the Queen.
ITV was fined a record £5.67 million in May for cheating viewers out of millions of pounds in premium-rate phone-in competitions.

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