According to Newsday, Nielsen Media Research reports that the amount of time each family spends in front of the TV is up to a record level. It now averages over 8 hours per day per household! Those who believe that excessive TV watching is exacerbating the obesity and shorter attention spam problems of the nation’s youth have more cause for alarm than ever.It’s also evident that TV viewership is *not* suffering due to competition with other media sources (like computers), but may be a result of the decline in movie theater attendance and media coverage of the war and natural disasters. Whatever the cause - 8 hours a day!? That’s a full time job in itself! I always make a conscious effort to try to keep the TV off most of the day (when I’m home anyway), and I suddenly find there are so many other things to do that I would otherwise have forgotten about. I’ll admit I’m probably just as bad with the computer as some are with TV, but at least on the computer I am either trying to puzzle out code or create something or write something which I think is slightly better for me than passively consuming television. I realize it’s not helping me physically at all.

Newsday article


Table from Nielsen Media Research