"I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you - and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland." - from a 1961 address by FCC Chairman Newton Minnow to an audience of television broadcasters.

Let me begin with a confession. I'm not among those who share Newton Minnow's now-famous biting assessment of the quality of television - that TV is "a vast wasteland." Not unconditionally, at least. Granted, pick up the remote and surf through the hundred or so channels of any cable or dish network and you'll find a deluge of mind-numbing programming. Evidence enough, certainly, to suggest the television industry has not seriously taken to heart Minnow's wake-up call back in 1961.

Nonetheless, quality programming does thrive among the waste. Epitomized by PBS, a handful of networks and individual programs offer us nightly doses of arts and education, history and science, travel and food, classic films and classical music, and, yes, even the occasionally redeeming sit-com. Programming that stimulates our intellectual curiosity and sates our hunger for things cultural and soulful. Quality stuff that allows us to turn on our television without guilt.

The real issue with TV, then, is not necessarily what we watch, but the amount of time we spend watching it. The problem is we're literally addicted to television. In fact, the average American now watches over four hours of TV a day (Nielson Media Research, 2000). That's two months out of each year we spend staring at the screen!

No room for our intellectual and cultural program tastes here as smug justification for turning on our TVs. If we're habitually planting ourselves in our favorite easy chair every evening, routinely succumbing to a few hours in front of the tube, we're simply wasting an awful lot of time that might otherwise be spent proactively engaged in our life. And it makes absolutely no difference whether we're tuning in to the latest Ken Burns documentary or following the audition progress of America's next popular music idol.

How often do we catch ourselves bemoaning our hectic-paced lifestyle and the demands it puts on our time? If only we could wring a few more hours out of each day, we tell ourselves, we'd spend more time exercising, socializing with friends, enjoying hobbies, spending quality time with our children and engaging in family conversations. Those activities we usually classify under that elusive category called "leisure time."

Yet, according to a 2004 time-use survey performed by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 96% of Americans age 15 and over spend an average of 5.18 hours a day enjoying some sort of leisure activity. Problem is, many of us spend half or more of that leisure time watching TV. In comparison, socializing with friends places a distant second - three-quarters of an hour - and exercise comes in third at just over 15 minutes per day on average. No wonder 65% of couch potato prone Americans are overweight today.

Seems that nebulous "leisure time" isn't quite so elusive as we might have thought. Thus, the choices we make to enhance our lifestyles become a matter of rearranging our priorities rather than finding time to work them all into our otherwise frantic schedules. That means examining the things in our lives that are most important to us - our families, our health and spiritual wellness, our passions and hobbies, and our friends. Compared to these, the temporary gratification of watching television pales in significance. Entertainment value aside, TV does not merit a full one or two months a year out of our lives. Common sense tells us the return on investment of our time just isn't there.

And that has more to do with the quality of our lives than the quality of the programming that mesmerizes us every evening.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
--You can read the text of Newton Minnow's famous address at http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/pdocs/minow_address.pdf
--For the complete results of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report referred to above, go to www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t01.htm.
--Facts and figures about our TV habit can be found at www.tvturnoff.org.