
Watching TV Makes You Smarter - kqr2
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/magazine/24TV.html
======
jseliger
... Except that there's a large body of research demonstrating otherwise. The
recent New Yorker article "Twilight of the Books" at
[http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071...](http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_atlarge_crain)
is a good place to start.

~~~
jdminhbg
From that article: "According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and
2003 the average adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one point on a five-
hundred-point scale..."

I don't know if this sentence is meant to raise alarms about the public's
literacy or about journalists' numeracy. Without having seen the study itself,
I'm going to guess that 0.2% is within its margin of error.

The first page makes a lot of slippery statistical arguments about people
'reading less,' but there's no factual connection between the opening
numerical salvo and the transition on page 2: "...some sociologists speculate
that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special
'reading class'..."

Older people have always thought that younger people are stupid and
illiterate, and that future young people will be even stupider and more
illiterate.

