A New View On TV
Economists Probe the Data on Television Watching
And Find It's Not All Bad; Better Test Scores?
By Justin Lahart
Sept. 6, 2008 11:59 pm ET
It didn't take long after America started tuning in to television that people started to worry about what it was doing to children. "When it offers a daily diet of Western pictures and vaudeville by the hour, television often seems destined to entertain the child into a state of mental paralysis," wrote The New York Times in 1949.
A generation later, the Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of college-bound teenagers had fallen significantly. A 1977 panel appointed by the College Entrance Examination Board suggested television bore some blame for the drop. Indeed, the decline began in the mid-1960s, just as the first students heavily exposed to TV took their SATs.