Assignment 5 - Claire Thompson

Before television, my grandma tells me, everyone huddled around a radio to listen to radio shows in the evening, instead of TVs like we do today. I know this already, but she tells me about how her family did this when she was young. When I was growing up, and iPods were really new, my dad bought one and put literally hundreds of hours of old radio show recordings onto it. Every morning, when he drove me to school, we listened to one. In many ways, this was a parallel, 60 years later, to my grandmother’s childhood.
All I can say is that not much has changed. Television can be a great force of good, and a great force of bad. When I say this, Fiona Apple’s 1997 VMA acceptance speech when she won the award for Best New Artist comes to mind. For me, what she said in that speech puts into simple words how TV—and the culture that is created around it—can be harmful. And yet, Fiona Apple gives this speech in order to make a televised opportunity to say something useful, meaningful, and even a little bit shocking. Watch it for yourself, it really is something special: