Critics like Samuel Huntington and Barbara Tuchman who try to claim that TV’s lowering of our aesthetic standards is responsible for a “contemporary culture taken over by commercialism directed to the mass market and necessarily to mass taste” 8 can be refuted by observing that their Propter Hoc isn’t even Post Hoc: by 1830, de Tocqueville had already diagnosed American culture as peculiarly devoted to easy sensation and mass-marketed entertainment, “spectacles vehement and untutored and rude” that aimed “to stir the passions more than to gratify the taste.”
Actually, it's always been about the money...tv corrupts because of the cost and process to distribute. Books have a different economics altogether.
