Today in America, nothing tends to create values and ideas into society more than television. Television is more than just entertainment; we receive late breaking news, latest fashions, and society's trends from watching it. There is nothing else on the earth that reaches as many people as television. According to IAGD.Net, the average American watches over 4 hours of TV a day. Also children spend more than 900 hours in a school year, but many will watch over 1000 hours of television in the same year. The American Academy of Pediatrics study says, by the time today's child reaches age 70, he or she will have spent approximately seven years watching TV. One thing can be said about television, the images and values that its viewers absorb are standards that the viewer can accept to be the norm. Television manipulates by showing its audience a false representation of society. The viewer then perceives these false representations as a model of what they, and society should be or act like. .
Since the conception of television programming, many of the images the viewers see instill notions of what they accept as a structure for society. Shows that portray the perfect family, such as "Leave It To Beaver" and "The Brady Bunch," leave viewers with a feeling emptiness if their own family does not meet the standards of the make-believe "Hi honey, I"m home" families of television. These shows falsely represent how the normal American family should look, act, and be like. Mrs. And Mr. Brady resolves each problem within the family by the end of each 30-minute episode. Viewers do not have 30-minute problems where then they disappear. They are left to only question why their lives are not as smooth running as their television idols. .
These images seem harmless enough but what television does to its viewers is it narrows their mind to the world by telling the viewer what the standard is. These pictures then shape our perceptions of the real world.
