Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 13, 1995 TAG: 9506130026
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON/STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In fact, more than 98 percent of U.S. households have a TV. The average family keeps the set on more than 71/2 hours a day.
But what about the tiny minority of people - making up just 1.7 percent of American households - who've decided to check out of the TV generation? How can they simply ignore the device that, in half a century, has transformed America by revolutionizing everything from presidential elections to the family dinner hour?
Members of the No-TV minority say they can live without the endless stream of make-believe murders and brain-numbing commercials, without the distractions from conversation and without the hassles of kids addicted to the ``Power Rangers'' or ``Beverly Hills 90210.''
As strange as it seems to television-loving Americans, these folks say they've got better things to do: hiking, biking, reading, writing letters, talking with friends and family.
"Why do the people who are always griping about not having enough time to do the things they want to do with their lives always find time for TV?" wonders Chuck Lynch, a Christiansburg machinist who often reads a book a night. He hasn't had a TV for nearly two decades. "They've still got two or three hours to sit down in front of the tube each night."
Many non-viewers believe, too, that TV's images are simply too fraught with violence, sexual titillation and social pathology.
"I think it creates a feeling of fear and horror in people," says Kay Montgomery, a mother of three whose family runs a dairy farm in Franklin County. "They eventually become so fearful that it causes a change in how we live our lives. We distrust other people. We distrust situations. We become fearful of anything new or different because of what we absorb on TV."
Montgomery and her husband, Melvin, both grew up without TV. When they first married, they couldn't afford one. After that, they just never saw the need. "And there was a silly reason, too," she says. "The reason being I didn't want him paying attention to TV instead of me."
Instead, they did a lot of talking, around the dinner table and everywhere else. They subscribe to a multitude of newspapers and magazines, including Newsweek, Life, National Geographic.
"I've read a lot of books," Montgomery says. "I'd be afraid to guess how many."
Her children - now ages 19, 20 and 24 - were honor students in high school. She doesn't believe they missed much growing up without TV - and she thinks they might be a bit better-adjusted for the lack of it.
She says her family tends to talk or argue things out rather than going off separately to stew over disagreements, and she believes not having a TV has something to do with that. Her kids' friends have told them: "Y'all fight differently than we do in our family."
Montgomery doesn't even worry about missing the weather reports on TV, which some people might expect would be crucial to a farm family. "My husband and I can look out the window and predict almost as well."
Few people feel the way the Montgomerys do.
The latest figures from Nielsen Media Research show that fewer than 1.65 million of the nation's 97 million households don't have TVs. And a good number of those families are without TVs not by choice but because they don't have electricity or live in isolated areas where they can't get reception.
Mary Beth Oliver, who teaches communications studies at Virginia Tech, says there's been plenty of research about people who watch TV, but little about those who don't. Researchers in Minnesota offered to give families $500 to give up TV for a month, but they still had trouble finding willing subjects. For many people - especially older folks - TV is a valued companion.
Oliver says studies of places where television is introduced generally find that people do less housework, sleep less, socialize less and have fewer hobbies after TV comes to town.
Most media experts assume that people who don't have televisions are better educated folks, often professionals, writers and artists, or conservative Christians who believe TV is immoral.
But the three dozen or so folks who responded to a Roanoke Times' call for readers without TVs turned out to be a mixed bunch: They included farmers, a store owner, students, a college professor, a family counselor, a factory worker. Some grew up without it. Others decided they were sick of it - or were still trying to decide whether to trash their television. Some were simply trying to take a break from it.
Even television's harshest detractors generally acknowledge it's a lost cause trying to persuade people to give it up. Instead, they urge people to limit the hours they watch, and to be more particular about which shows they watch.
A new advocacy group, TV-Free America, contends that trying to improve content is hopeless. The D.C.-based organization's director, Henry Labalme, argues that regardless of what show you watch, TV is a passive "non-activity" that offers little real information or entertainment.
What's worse, Labalme says, is that television serves as an unquestioning conveyer belt for the notion that you are what you buy - that the path to happiness is through acquiring newer and nicer things.
TV's message, Labalme complains, is this: "Happiness doesn't come from reading to your daughter at night, or working in your garden, growing your own vegetables, going to church, volunteering at the local homeless shelter, watching the birds, star-gazing on a clear night. It comes from the acquisition of things - whether it's a Buick, a Club Med vacation, an Anheuser Busch beer or a Carnival Cruise."
To take its anti-television message to the people, Labalme's organization designated the last week in April as National TV-Turnoff Week. The effort produced no noticeable drop in the Nielsen ratings, but TV-Free America claims as many as 1 million pledged to give up television for a week.
At Crystal Spring Elementary School in Roanoke, 293 of the school's 299 children pledged not to watch TV for five days. Cynthia Ries, a parent who co-chaired the Parent-Teacher Association's no-TV drive at Crystal Spring, says most of the students honored their pledges. "I would say there were a score of kids who fell off the wagon."
Ries worries about the effects of television, but she says, "I'm not a big purist." Her goal was to help kids learn how to get their TV watching under control. She limits her children - ages 4 and 8 - to no more than an hour of television a day. During her work on the TV-free week, she says, "I kept running into parents who are more strict than I am."
Ann Martyn, a marriage and family counselor who lives in Floyd County, worries about TV's effects on relationships, both between spouses and between parents and children. She believes people use it to tune out each other. "It's like having a little thin wall around a person - with a little 'Do Not Enter' sign."
Martyn and her husband, Frank O'Brien, who teaches Irish literature at Hollins College, didn't have a television for the first six years of their marriage.
Then in the early 1980s, she began hearing a lot about a show called "Cheers," a comedy about the inhabitants of a bar in Boston. "Then I went to lunch with a friend who said, 'You know, they're selling TVs at Revco for $78.' So it was the beginning of a bad turn. But I really loved 'Cheers.' "
Her husband began watching 'Miami Vice,' a hard-driving cop show with a rock 'n' roll soundtrack. She found it disquieting, even when she was in another room, "hearing the yelling and the gunshots and the screeching wheels. And here I was cooking. It was like noise pollution to me."
When she watched it herself, she didn't like what she saw. "I realized that every relationship in the show displayed a betrayal of trust. Every relationship had its price or turned sour. I thought that was a destructive message packaged with these racy fashions and great music."
When the TV broke five years ago, it was the impetus for a change. They got it repaired, but now they have no antenna - and thus no TV reception. It's hooked up to a video player in the basement so they can watch movies from time to time. Martyn says not having television is a relief.
Phyllis Leary, 19, grew up without ever having a TV in her family's Pulaski County home. Leary, who just finished her first year at Radford University, wonders why people imitate what they see on shows such as "Married With Children," a comedy about a dysfunctional family - the Bundys - led by a weasely father named Al.
"I think TV gives people a certain state of mind. It's gross," Leary says. "People get to where they try to be like Al Bundy."
She worries, too, that many students these days "have an attention span of 15 minutes, which is actually the time between station breaks. It's time to take a break and get up and stretch. In real life, things don't work that way."
Leary graduated first in her class from Pulaski County High School. She reads constantly. She's a Cub Scout den leader, and she has worked with her family delivering Meals on Wheels to elderly shut-ins.
The family - Phyllis has three older brothers - has always favored doing things outdoors over being couch potatoes. Her dad, Linton Leary, runs Divers Corner in Radford and three New River Valley Rent-All stores.
Linton Leary says he's had friends tell him, "You ought to watch what's on the Discovery Channel" and go on to describe the nature and adventure programs showing people mountain climbing and scuba diving.
"I say: No thank you, folks. I'm already doing that. I dived in Antarctica."
Some of his diving is less exotic, Leary says, "but it's an awful lot more fun than sitting and watching the idiot tube."
by CNB