Children aged 2-11 watch over 24 hours of TV per week, while adults aged 35-49 watch more than 33 hours, according to data from Nielsen that suggests TV time increases the older we get. The average American watches more than five hours of live television every day.

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How many do they spend in school or church?

No, I was just bored yesterday.  I knew as soon as I dissed an official, critically consecrated, financially canonized movie God like His Clintness that it would set off the Eschatots.   There is nothing they are such huge suckers for as entertainment figures who are officially deemed to be great artistes and not to be held vulnerable to moral and intellectual scrutiny.

If the NY media had deemed Leni Riefenstahl a great artiste in the way it has Clint it would be verboten to mention those little facts about her promoting Hitler and Nazism just as it's forbidden to note that the large bulk of Clint Eastwood's movies are propaganda for the incoherent, contradictions that have assembled into this years' Trumpian strong-man fascism, paving the way and straightening the road to it for decades.  He wasn't the only one, there were so many others doing that in the American entertainment industry, making the ideas and, more importantly, appetites for its component parts, first acceptable, then mandatory that it would be impossible to come up with a comprehensive list.

One of the most striking things I read in the past two decades pointed out how few hours of actual, waking time is contained in a normal life span and that we get exactly as many hours to do whatever we're going to do and no more.  Americans, since the introduction of Television, spend most of that time devoted to gaining information with entertainment media - Hollywood TV shows and movies are what is responsible for what we, as a country, are, not the far more minimal influence of such institutions as the churches, the schools, even the universities which have largely gone along with the Hollywood regime as they have been forced to dumb down and deal with the TV educated population.  There is no way for those institutions that get the blame to compete with the ease and designed attention absorption of facile, Hollywood style entertainment.  The "news" relieved by the actor, Ronald Reagan, of even the minimal responsibilities imposed on it by former regulations, is now infotanement, though that trend preceded Reagan throwing out the Fairness Doctrine and public service requirements.  TV was what paved the way for Reagan, just as it is paving the way for Trump, both are the creation of the entertainment industry.

American democracy was entertained to death, which was inevitable when "free speech" and "free press" was held to mean that the media had no social responsibilities, no responsibility to accurately inform voters, no responsibility to not lie to and propagandize them on behalf of the financial interests of those off camera and on, the owners and their buddies who bought ad time.  Its focus on audience share, as a means of maximizing profit lead it to use methods of attracting the most eyes through the most seductive of means, the lowest common denominator, the most facile appeal to the worst in our appetites.  Sex, violence, hate, especially hate - Orwell got that pretty comprehensively right and what he didn't, Aldous Huxley did.

Walter Brueggemann has pointed out that in the United States the only institutions that oppose the imperial-consumer-corporate fascist system are those churches which do, in fact, stand against what our domestic fascists' value.  Which is both a reason that they are under attack and disappeared from the American media except for the assertion of their impending death.  And that is why it is so wrong-headed for people on the left to attribute to them the corruptions that they would not have the power to impose, to start with.  Even those religious entities that are part of the American Roman style imperial system are of far less influence than entertainment in influencing how people think and act, apart from a few tiny sects who enforce a ban on TV and movies and even those carry the risk that some of their members might read The Law, the prophets and the Gospels and take what they read there seriously.

The alleged left is no less influenced by media crap than the right, which is one of the reasons that real liberalism is pretty much dead, there is no preferential option for the poor in corporate American entertainment, you've got to go to religion to get that and, by and large, the alleged-left has gotten anti-religion sold to them.  Most of what liberals retain in that is merely tribal sentiment because it was what former generations of lefties motivated by*.  Besides, that kind of religion is no more attractive to most people than rigorous academic study.   Less so because it might interfere with their fun and it makes requirements of them.  The gospel of Clint carries only vicarious obligations while promising sex and violence as compensations.  That's the difference between fantasy and reality.  The virtues bound up in fantasy have only imaginary costs, which make them so much more appealing.

I could go on and on with this but I'll just end with wondering how many of the Sanders fans would really react if their taxes went up to pay for his proposed programs.  I mean even if they went up five percent. My guess is they'd suddenly discover that their fantasy came with costs in real life and they would rather not pay.  I doubt that much of what they imbibed from their major sources of information in the American media ever prepared them to make actual sacrifices in real life instead of imagining that other people are going to pay those bills.  Marilynne Robinson in talking about the great Mid-Western public universities of the past noted that they were seen as a public good provided through taxation and a source of benefit to future generations.  But those far less affluent farmers and laboring people knew that someone had to pay for them.  It's no wonder that they were some of the first institutions attacked by the corporatists, turning a university education into a luxury for the rich.

* It's necessary,  though, to distinguish between those who saw the destitute and poor as a primary focus of preference and those, mostly Marxists, who saw them as a means to the end of their own power.  The denomination of poor people as "the masses" was a give away that they were never seen by such people as more than a force to be harnessed for the purposes of those who see them as their betters.  Such "leftists" are really not much different from the corporate fascists, which explains the nature of the governments ruled by such people.