I have long enjoyed the works of Neil Postman.
I had to read him for a freshman communications class in college.
And (at exactly the same time in my life back then) Pastor MacArthur recommended Postman’s book “Amusing Ourselves to Death.”
This little bit about politics and television news is the type of thing Postman nails so well:
A second example concerns our politics. It is clear by now that the people who have had the most radical effect on American politics in our time are not political ideologues or student protesters with long hair and copies of Karl Marx under their arms. The radicals who have changed the nature of politics in America are entrepreneurs in dark suits and grey ties who manage the large television industry in America. They did not mean to turn political discourse into a form of entertainment. They did not mean to make it impossible for an overweight person to run for high political office. They did not mean to reduce political campaigning to a 30-second TV commercial. All they were trying to do is to make television into a vast and unsleeping money machine. That they destroyed substantive political discourse in the process does not concern them. — Neil Postman