For thirty-five years, David Halberstam, an unsilent member of the Silent Generation, has contemplated America and its place in the world, casting his eye on big subjects - Vietnam, global economics, race, mass media, and the 1950s.

When you mutilate movies for mass media, you tamper with the hearts and minds of America.

Mass communication--wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued--presents us wit a serious daner, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in all the cities of the country. (p. 73)

The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.

America needs freedom from its mass media.

Mass media wants bright lights. Mass media wants crazy clothes.