By Lloyd Gray, Editor, Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal • October 7, 1997
November-December 1997 – For years now, television programming has been under intense scrutiny, particularly for its impact on children. Political pressure, advertiser boycotts and other means have been used in an attempt to force the industry to clean up its act.
The complaints have been largely on target. There is too much violence on TV. Programmers seem to have an adolescent fixation with sex. Little of real educational value is shown. Children can acquire some messed up values if they watch a lot of television, and so can the rest of us.
Out of all the hand-wringing has come a rating system for TV programs and, last week, a new federal requirement that broadcasters weekly show three hours of children’s educational fare. Organized pressure continues, with mixed results, to get networks to tone down their excesses.
Yet all of this discussion revolves around a questionable premise: that television is indispensable to modern life. It seems to take for granted that we all have to watch TV, the children included, so the goal is to improve what we see. Rarely if ever does anyone involved in the TV crusade, from the President on down, suggest that life without television is actually a possibility.
Sure, there’s the frequently heard response to critics of TV programming that they can simply “change the channel” or “turn it off.” And there are the periodic campaigns to get people to go for a day or two or even a week without watching television.
But the bold suggestion that people don’t really need TV – that they can do just fine not only with the set turned off but without one in the house at all – is not part of the discussion. Yet there are people, rare though they may be, who live a perfectly happy life in a home with no TV.
Dr. Mark and Ann Blair Huffman of Tupelo and their three children, for example. They don’t own a television set. Never have, and as far as they can see, never will.
They didn’t one day get mad, say, “We’ve had enough,” and in a dramatic display of righteous indignation cast the set on the trash heap. They’ve just never felt the need for it.
Ann Blair was already conditioned this way since she grew up in a TV-less home, the choice of her parents who simply felt there were more important, useful and interesting things to do with your time. Her childhood was bereft of such critical cultural clues as the name of the Beverly Hillbillies’ banker or the birth order of Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe. She survived. She expects her children will, too.
Of course, they get looks of disbelief from some people when they find out they don’t have a TV. And there was the baby sitter who met the Huffmans at the door when they returned home one night with the anguished cry, “Where is it?!” But the family takes all this in stride.
If Ann Blair simply doesn’t need TV, Mark doesn’t need the temptation of one around the house. He admits he’d watch it all the time if it were there, and he’s got lots of other things he needs to get done. Since there’s never been one around, he doesn’t miss it.
And remarkably, the children don’t either. It’s not that they’ve never been exposed to it. They’ll watch at neighbors’ or friends’ houses, and on rare occasions, such as the Olympics or when relatives are coming, their parents will rent one for a few days. But they don’t pine away for the TV set.
What’s the result? “The kids do a lot more reading in the evenings than they might do if we had a TV,” Mark says. (So much for the need for “educational programming.”) And, he adds, having them not exposed to a lot of the objectionable material on TV is a nice extra.
The bottom line: “The kids are learning you don’t have to have a TV to function quite nicely in this world.”
Is that a lesson any of the rest of us might dare to learn? 
