Mass communications, particularly television, has replaced the family, the school, and the church - in that order - as the prinicipal instruments for socialization and transmission of values. In replacing these three previously decisive institutions of value transferral and continuity, television has been driven by its equivalent of Gresham's law: bad programming pushes out good programming since the broadest common appeal is not the noblest in man, but to his lowest prurient interests and morbid fears and anxieties. Television has thus become an instrument for the dissemination of corruptive, demoralizing, and destructive values.

Precisely the values that have been considered throughout civilized history by all societies and all religions to be destructive and disintegrative - greed, debauchery, violence, unlimited self-gratification, absence of moral restraint - are the daily fare glamorously dished up to our children.

If that reality does not alarm us, the soul of the leading nation of the world order has already rotted beyond repair.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

National security advisor to President Jimmy Carter
(emphasis mine)