Originally posted by: JediSage
Discovery and History, and Military, and all in that class make up a small minority of the available content (and let's be honest, American Chopper???). Think about what you're doing when you're watching tv..you slip into that receptive mode where all you do is soak up what's being sent to you. If you watched nothing but Masterpiece Theater (or something "educational") all day then I would say at least your content was good, but you're still just totally switching off your brain when in front of the tube.

Except that when I turn on Discovery, History, or the Military channel, I don't just turn off my brain. I pay just as much attention to the History channel as I do to an episode of Heroes. Example, History was running a series called "The States". They covered Texas and explained why it's the "Lone Star State". The explanation I'd always heard is that they had something written into the Constitution that would allow them to secede if they wanted to. According to THC, it's because they went from being part of Mexico, to being an independent nation, to becoming a State. Pretty interesting stuff.

Watching educational programs is no worse than sitting and reading a book for an hour. It's not nearly the same as watching a game show or the latest reality TV program. Even Mythbusters is a pretty educational program. How many times have you been having a conversation and someone will make an off the cuff remark about some urban myth and you say "Mythbusters disproved that"? It happens to me all the time.

ADM, I'm not even going to respond to your comments. AFAICT, no one brought that up at all. I don't know if you were interjecting that as a preventative measure or what. I think it was a little uncalled for since I'm pretty sure most people here agree that this about this one guy doing this as a protest, not the government trying to censor books.