The average American who watches five hours of television per day sees approximately 21,000 commercials per year. That’s 21,000 repetitions of essentially identical messages about life, aggressively placed into viewers minds, all saying, Buy something - do it now! So an entire nation of people is sitting night after night in their rooms, in a passive condition, receiving information from faraway places in the form of imagery placed in their brains, telling them how to live their lives. If the instrument responsible for this activity weren’t TV, our familiar companion, then you would probably call it a system of mass brainwashing and political control, and would be damned worried about it.
— Jerry Mander (In the Absence of the Sacred)
