Everyone else I know also seems perfectly able to separate television's entertainment from its selling functions. Everyone besides them, it seems. Underlying the whole argument is the stale whiff of elitism, the notion that while you, gentle reader, may be able to watch Friends without suffering the uncontrollable urge to rush out and buy IKEA furniture and feminine hygeine products, the poor unwashed masses must be protected from this horrid fate. Television affects people physically. But any law student can tell you that the inherently unnatural act of reading is actually a much bigger contributor to vision loss, and I'm certainly sitting a lot closer to the computer screen on which I'm composing this article than I ever do to a television set.
Television is biased.
And television is definitely a 'lean back' experience. There are worse things in the world after a long day at work than curling up with a favorite program, and it doesn't seem too much to ask that we be allowed to do so without a bunch of cultural Oompa-Loompas making us feel guilty. The answers to life's problems aren't in the bottom of a glass. They're on television. In fact, it's not enough to say television isn't as bad as everyone says.