Television and opium

[bondy]

Who said Television is the opium of the people paraphrasing Karl Marx?

[TCL-MUMPING]

This is the earliest I've found

"Imagine if the Japanese had won World War II and had introduced into American life a drug so insidious that 30 years later the average American was spending five hours a day "loaded" on the drug. People would just view is as an outrageous atrocity. And yet, we in America do this to ourselves. And the horrifying thing about the "trip" that television gives you is that it's not your trip. It is a trip that comes down through the values systems of a society whose greatest god is the almighty dollar. So television is the opiate of the people. I think the tremendous governmental resistance to the psychedelic issue is not because psychedelics are multi-million dollar criminal enterprises - they are trivial on that level. However, they inspire examination of values, and that is the most corrosive thing that can happen."

Terence McKenna Interview published in 1990

http://www.salvia-divinorum-scotland.co.uk/quo tes/mckenna/prejudice.htm

[heathfield]

I like the description of TV as ''Chewing gum for the eyes.'' (attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright).

[chrisrob]

I've come up with a Time magazine article from 1957 where one Edward Murrow uses the phtase in an interview.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,91 71,809673,00.html

[bondy]

Thanks for the answers especially the one from Time Magazine. I'd thought it may have been something in a song lyric more recently but I guess it has become a sort of street reworking with no direct incidence of its origin.