“They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip, and local politics.”

“the television culture celebrates incompetence.”

“In my neighborhood, gossip is a competitive sport that’s been raised to Olympic standard, and I never diss gossip; I revere it with all my heart.”

“1966 and 1968 were a world removed from each other in the political and cultural life of the United States . . .”

“In a darkening world where the shadows of violence, political expediency, materialism and junk culture grow ever longer, sport as it is practised by its good pros remains a bastion of decency, a place where virtue is rewarded and cheating exposed.”

“Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. (92)”