Totalitarian television.

• Author: Burns, Daniel
• Position: From Readers - Brief Article - Letter to the Editor

In "The Hidden Shame of the Global Industrial Economy" [January/February], Ed Ayres speaks of the "unspoken disincentive of the worlds' media giants to expose the exploitative nature of the industries ... and reluctance to undermine the foundations of the economy on which the whole business rests."

Sure, but it goes way beyond that. Television, by its very nature, is totalitarian. Not only does it determine what we think about, but it prohibits serious thought about what it doesn't embrace, because what isn't on TV just isn't considered important in the general mind. There's something scary and unnatural about millions of minds experiencing the same thoughts in unison.

This was borne home to me in Bolivia recently. After an arduous two-day trip to a remote, roadless part of the country, I arrived in the evening to see all the shop vendors watching the same program that people were watching where I had come from, light years away in terms of lifestyle.

Amazonian TV rarely deals with local issues; it provides the same ubiquitous soaps and U.S. police series seen everywhere else. People may agree that...