Ray Bradbury: all TV spews out are ‘factoids’

Fahrenheit 451, the book and the movie, has for decades been the benchmark film on government censorship and McCarthyian witchhunts. But its author, Ray Bradbury, who won a special citation at Columbia University’s Pulitzer Prize ceremony last month, says it was about neither censorship or witchhunts.

It was, he says, a book about how television destroys interest in reading literature. “Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” he says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: “factoids.”

“As early as 1951, Bradbury presaged his fears about TV, in a letter about the dangers of radio, written to fantasy and science-fiction writer Richard Matheson. Bradbury wrote that “Radio has contributed to our ‘growing lack of attention.’… This sort of hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again. We have become a short story reading people, or, worse than that, a QUICK reading people.”

Read the full article here: Fahrenheit 451 misinterpreted

Link courtesy Vivek Rajagopalan
Posted in People, Television