A comprehensive Italian study "The Political Legacy of Entertainment TV"
came out recently (available at
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20150958 ), providing
compelling evidence that TV exposure in young age permanently affects IQ
and cognitive abilities in general.
It is focused on Berlusconi's Mediaset, and deals with rather large
samples, covering the influence that happened several decades ago,
affecting today's adult population. Here are few quotes from the study
(which should be read in its entirety):
"Overall, these results suggest that early exposure to entertainment TV
led to a decrease in cognitive sophistication and civic engagement, but
only for individuals exposed during childhood."
"Indeed, ideology does not seem to matter for politicians’ communication
style: the coefficient of the dummy for right-wing parties is not
statistically significant and small in magnitude. Instead, communication
style is most similar between Berlusconi and the populist leader of the
M5S; see the additional evidence in online Appendix Figure A9. The M5S
is also the only other party attracting votes from individuals who were
exposed earlier to entertainment TV (Table 5)."
"Overall, we conclude that early Mediaset viewers did not idealize
Berlusconi’s qualities as either a man or a politician. Rather, they
appear to filter such qualities through a different system of values,
presumably influenced by their prior exposure to Mediaset."
"Our findings offer the first systematic evidence that exposure to
entertainment television influences voting behavior, and suggests that
this effect is mediated by deeper cognitive and cultural transformations."
===
Relatively primitive TV technology from decades ago had deep measurable
and permanent influence on today's adult voting population. The content
does not seem to matter - the volume and style do.
Which means that low-volume (articles, books and conferences) reasoning
against these manufactured attitudes is a waste of time. If you can't
force-feed them your counter-propaganda, or disrupt force-feeding by
controlling communication pipes, you are wasting everyone's time.
Fast forward few decades - instead of being glued to the broadcast
television screens with content same for everyone for several hours
daily, the populus today is glued to smaller screens with customized
content for the most of waking hours. Make a wild guess how will this
affect cognitive abilities and political attitudes when they are
measured few decades from now (the only problem is that there will not
be relevant control set.)
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