Rav Avigdor Miller on the Evils of Television

A:

I’ll gladly comply, but with one exception – it won’t be brief.

But first we’ll listen to a couple of stories. There was a church that threw a party and in the backyard of the church they made a fire. But they didn’t have any fuel. Instead they advertised everybody should bring his television and throw it into the fire. And many people came with their televisions and it became a huge bonfire.

Now why did those people do that? After all, we’re not talking about people who have strict inhibitions like Orthodox Jews do. They’re Christians, yes, and they have certain restrictions. But even strict Christians are never as tightly restricted as Orthodox Jews are.

The answer is that these people saw that a change had taken place in their family. Their children were different. The family was different. For three hours the atmosphere of the family was now transported to Las Vegas or to Broadway and 42nd Street. They saw things that didn’t jive with family atmosphere. People like to have a family. They want their dining room to be a place that expresses the spirit and the ideals of the family. And here, through that box in the living room came all the things that they didn’t want.

They started noticing that their children became fresh. The children started using words that they never heard before. And the children were experimenting with crimes. They were playing games like tying up one of them and saying, “You’re our grandfather,” and they were taking a kitchen knife and acting like they wanted to slaughter their grandfather. That’s what’s portrayed on television. And after a while it happened in practice. Neighbor’s children did that. Children killed old people. All kinds of wickedness began to be displayed in practice.

Now recently there was a suit brought in California against the networks because a crime happened, a serious crime, and the parents sued the networks and they almost won. But it went to the Supreme Court. Of course the Supreme Court is liberal so they said it’s against freedom of speech to stifle the television.

All over America, however, many people have shut off their television set permanently because they know what’s happening. Psychologists have warned against the effects. Besides the fact that it takes children away from their homework and it makes them introverts – they don’t mix with people anymore; they just sit and look at that little box – but besides for that, it changes the whole pattern of society. It ruins character. Besides giving them all these wicked examples and selling them all kinds of trash that’s being sold to children, giving them false desires for things that they don’t need and are not good for them.

And therefore since so many gentiles today have come to the consensus that television is far from being a blessing so the question is how long are we going to wait and wake up to what’s taking place within ourselves. We’re being changed by television. We’re the slaves of a machine.

Now, I’ll give you an idea how the programs are planned. The manager of one of the biggest networks in the country revealed how he makes his program. At breakfast he reads the New York Times. He said that. He said that’s our bible. These are his words. “That’s our bible.” And now he knows how to plan his programs.

So whenever he hears of a tidbit; let’s say there are criminals somewhere in Boston who marched into a college with their rifles; black criminals. It happens to be they were black. They could be white criminals too, but in this case they were black criminals. And they demanded certain things, certain unjust things. They wanted privileges that nobody had ever gotten before. So what did they do, these criminals? They took rifles and they marched in.

What happened? Did they bring in the state troopers? Did they shoot them down? No! The spineless people yielded to them; they give in to their demands and they created a department of black studies. You know what black studies are? Number one, black studies are soul music; music that’s played in cheap cafes in Negro neighborhoods. Black studies also means courses in black English. Away with the fancy English of old England. The English as it’s spoken in the black ghettos is just as good, and they want college credit for it. And they want black spelling. They don’t want to learn how to spell according to how white people spell. That’s racism! They want to spell the way Negros spell. And black culture, that’s also a course of study. So now you have a whole system of subjects, and they’re getting full credit for it in the colleges.

And they graduate. They become accredited teachers. And so now you have a black professor. How did he get through? He didn’t have any high school equivalency diploma. But still, under a special program he was admitted to college. That’s what they do. They admit him to college without a high school diploma because you have to make up for lost time. They were slaves once so you have to give them special privileges. So he was admitted into the college under a special program for black students – they get all the privileges now.

A man described this to me. He was waiting in line in the college to get his books. He had to pay for his books. But then a man announced, “All black students come up front. They get their books first and free.” So they got their books first. They needed them like they needed a hole in the head! He at least is studying his books. But he’s paying for his books and he had to wait in line for two hours before he got them because of the color of his skin.

So when the television manager reads in the New York Times about these armed blacks marching on a college, so he sends a telegram to his men in Boston: “Quickly go to this and this college and film, televise, the confrontation.”

And so the black students are marching in with their guns, and now they see that they’re heroes. All over the country this is portrayed as the uprising of the downtrodden persecuted blacks. They’re persecuted – they have to study too hard to get a diploma. And it’s televised and that’s what the television audience sees.

Or here’s a bunch of gays breaking the windows of a clergyman. There was a clergyman who didn’t want to give in to the gays. He fought against the gays. So they came to his church and broke his windows. Oh! This story the television producer reads about or hears about so he sends his men and he shows how the gays are fighting for their rights. Remember Stonewall! They perished fighting for the noble cause of homosexuality.

And all these things are played up and the dumb public gets the idea these are noble things.

Now this television producer doesn’t show things that are decent. He wouldn’t show a picture of people fighting for decency, fighting for victims, fighting for justice. No! It’s always for criminals, always for the worst element, because that’s what whets the appetite of these wicked people — tape recording ended here, v’chaval al d’avdin.

TAPE # 276 (August 1979)