By its very nature, TV (like all other visual media) relies on image rather than ideas, superficiality rather than substance. Television connects and communicates by stirring the emotions, not by offering profound thoughts or probing analysis. Immediacy represents the medium’s principal virtue: TV broadcasts can put you “right there,” experiencing dramatic events in the very moments that they unfold, but they never do well at giving a sense of context or continuity.

With Hurricane Katrina, for instance, televised reports offered a powerful sense of devastation and suffering, while suggesting that President Bush in some way caused every imaginable misfortune. The riveting coverage, however, could hardly convey the truth that the long-term Democratic establishment in New Orleans and Baton Rouge actually bore primary responsibility for the lack of adequate emergency preparations, and hardly addressed the Big Easy’s pre-hurricane status as the most impoverished city in the country.

The television emphasis on immediacy and impatience (when people get bored they quickly change the channel) feeds the nation’s most destructive epidemic: the dreaded “Do Something Disease”: the conviction that every problem demands immediate activism in order to make us feel better, regardless of whether the gestures in question actually provide a long-term improvement in the situation.

Liberalism cherishes such meaningless feel-good notions. The Democrats feel outraged at the rise in gas prices, so they demand a satisfying and vindictive “wind-fall profits tax” on the greedy oil companies—never mind the fact that raising taxes on an industry always makes the prices of its product go up, not down. The nation feels disgusted and outraged at the brutal death of Matthew Shepard, so the liberals demand new “hate crimes” legislation – regardless of the reality that it’s already against the law to rob any victim (gay or straight) and to beat him to death, and that the gay student’s two killers are already serving two consecutive life sentences (each) for his murder.

Liberal hero Lyndon Johnson looks at the pain of destitution in the United States and launches his vaunted, costly “War on Poverty” – but as President Reagan ultimately observed, “We had a War on Poverty, and Poverty won.” Five Trillion dollars in social spending attempted to redeem the status of the nation’s poor but by most measures, the many well-intentioned programs only made the situation worse. Nevertheless, leftists defend the failed efforts at amelioration (just as they apologize for failed socialist experiments around the globe) because the do-gooders made us all feel better about attempting to address the suffering of the wretched of the earth – regardless of disastrous outcomes.

Like the tacky ending of a supposedly uplifting TV show, liberal programs emphasize feelings more than consequences, good intentions more than good results. No wonder that those who make TV the major factor in their lives feel most comfortable with leftist efforts to remake the world; and no wonder that those who embrace liberal values, find encouragement and sustenance in the shallow, manipulative, context-free world of televised news and entertainment.

In describing the common ground between the TV medium and the liberal world-view, I haven’t once cited the long-standing (and highly credible) charges of leftist media bias. The provocative new study from the Culture and Media Institute doesn’t examine what the respondents choose to watch, but rather measures the overall extent of their TV viewing, regardless of content. Perhaps some of the heavy viewers spend all four hours per night riveted by The History Channel, or Discovery, or PBS (fat chance).

For the purposes of this study, and for my analysis, it doesn’t matter how tasteful or admirable the viewing selections: four hours (or more) per night will bring the same doleful impact—leading to more isolation and less durable and significant real world relationships, a more dire perspective on the world around us along with a corresponding sense of desperation and powerlessness, and a superficial, impatient, emotional emphasis on immediacy and feeling, rather than context and consequence.

In other words, the problem with heavy television viewing isn’t the low quality of what we watch (though God knows the quality is low) but rather the high quantity. That means that the most important response to the study at hand (especially for those who want to raise their children free of the taint of liberal pathologies) isn’t to push for supply side solutions from mass media, but to deploy demand solutions for every American family.

We may remain unable to impact what the TV industry makes, but we can certainly change what each of us takes – and resolve to count ourselves among the connected, clear thinking light viewers, rather than the addled, lonely, and dysfunctional heavy consumers of the pop culture’s principal form of mindless and misleading diversion.