What does it all mean?

[Big Magilla]

From the New Yorker

When the subject of children’s television comes up, Emily Nussbaum writes in the current issue of The New Yorker, everyone knows the drill:

egin with the sinister idiom “screen time.” To show you’re no prig, make a warm remark about “Sesame Street.” … Then begin the lament, and lay it on thick, with comparisons to candy and drugs. Decry the trend of marketing to newborns, the co-branded toys, the childhood obesity, the dwindling attention spans, the fate of the picture book, the wasted hours the American child spends in front of the tube (three a day, on average!), and all those selfish, shower-taking parents who use TV as a babysitter.

Concerns about the effects of TV on children have been around since the medium’s birth. In a 1948 Talk story, E. J. Kahn, Jr., and William Shawn wrote about a four-year-old boy named Jeffrey “who has never known life without television.” They saw in Jeffrey’s upbringing, “a glimpse of what, in the dawning age of television, may soon be the experience of all parents.” In order to see the effects of his lifelong exposure to television, the writers accompanied the boy’s father, who took his son to Central Park to play baseball for the first time. “I’ll be damned if he doesn’t look like Joe DiMaggio,” the father remarked of Jeffrey’s batting stance and swing. Handed a baton, the lad imitated Toscanini, who’d made his television début a month earlier. Kahn and Shawn catalogued the other ways access to television set Jeffrey apart from his peers:

He plays cops-and-robbers a good deal more realistically than boys raised merely on radio; he knows, for instance, how to frisk a man for a concealed firearm by patting his armpits and hips. He has seen three prizefights on television…. Accordingly, whenever Jeffrey plays at boxing, he crumples to the floor, in an altogether professional manner. He takes television so much for granted that on a number of occasions, while visiting the homes of friends or relatives, he has looked around their living rooms and asked, “Where’s the television set?”


What terrible fate awaited this progeny of the new television age? Unemployment? Poor socialization? A life of solitude? None of the above, in fact. The four-year-old that Kahn and Shawn wrote about was none other than Jeffrey Lyons, son of the New York Post columnist Leonard Lyons. Jeffrey, of course, went on to be film critic for WPIX and MSNBC and to author numerous books, including several on baseball. Clearly, his early and frequent exposure to television ruined his life.