A similar hypothesis makes sense in other domains. Since World War II, higher education has mushroomed. Even colleges with local constituencies increasingly have recruited faculty nationally, and the faculty have shaped student ambitions toward national law, medical, and business schools and corporate traineeships. If students drawn to these programs are among the people likeliest in the past to have been civic spark plugs, we have an alternative explanation for civic decline. Better to conceive the changes we find as a new environment of civic and political activity with altered institutional openings for engagement.
Television is a part of the ecology, but in complex ways.
It is a significant part of people's use of their waking hours, but it may be less a substitute for civic engagement than a new and perhaps insidious form of it. TV has been more politicized since the late 1960s than ever before. All in the Family in 1971 became the first prime-time sitcom to routinely take on controversial topics, from homosexuality to race to women's rights. Donahue was first syndicated in 1979, Oprah followed in 1984, and after them, the deluge. The latest blast at the news media, James Fallows's Breaking the News , picks up a familiar theme that the efforts of both print and broadcast journalists since the 1960s to get beneath the surface of events has led to a journalistic presumption that no politician can be trusted and that the story behind the story will be invariably sordid.