"The media are undermining America's sense of personal responsibility," the Culture and Media Institute reported Wednesday in its study, "The Media Assault on American Values" (online in PDF format). "The more a person watches television, the less likely he will be to accept responsibility for his own life and for his obligations to the people around him."

The study found that, for example, 64 percent of "heavy" TV viewers (those who reported watching 4 or more hours per day) should be responsible for their own retirement, compared to 43 percent of "light" TV viewers (an hour or less per day). The CMI study also found a similar pattern in charitable giving and volunteering, with "heavy" viewers reporting lower levels of involvement than "light" viewers.

The study is based on CMI's National Cultural Values Survey, which Cheryl Wetzstein reported on in March.

Speaking at Wednesday's panel discussion of the new report were CMI Director Robert H. Knight, Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, L. Brent Bozell III of the Media Research Center, and author/columnist/talk-radio host Michael Medved.

Discussing the correlations found by the CMI study, Mr. Lichter emphasized that researchers should "not go beyond your evidence," noted the inverse relationship between TV viewing and socio-economic status (the higher your status, the less TV you watch), and said that the study presents some "chicken-and-egg" questions.

Mr. Medved talked about the nature of television, making several comments that elicited laughter from the audience of nearly 100. Mr. Medved noted that the new film "Knocked Up," is based on the premise that an unattractive dopehead loser could be romantically paired with the stunning Katherine Heigl: "In this sense, it's a science fiction film."

Television promotes three basic values -- negativity, impatience and superficial emotionality -- Mr. Medved said. He noted that TV news favors a "crisis of the month" approach, and said the bias toward bad news is "not ideological." As to TV's fostering of impatience, Mr. Medved said, "The remote control could be one of the most invidious devices in human history," whereas the "visual immediacy" of TV lends itself to an emotion-driving "follow your heart" message.

Mr. Medved also noted that TV may be destructive of "moral values" in a very direct way, since high levels of TV viewing are correlated with high divorce rates. "TV is the enemy of relationships," he said.

In listening to the discussion, I could not help thinking of a movie I recently saw on DVD, Mike Judge's "Idiocracy," which postulates in a dumbed-down, TV-saturated future: "It's got the electrolytes plants crave!"

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times