Bill Maher delivered one of his reliably combustible editorials at the end of his weekly HBO talk program on Friday October 13, addressing what has been described as a post-pandemic mental-health crisis that is sweeping the country. "There has been a perfect storm of events in recent years that has led the surgeon general to issue an advisory that America is suffering from 'a public health crisis of loneliness, isolation and lack of connection,'" he said. He noted the usual reasons that we hear all too often these days, including the lingering impact of the prolonged COVID lockdown, the proliferation of self-checkout counters at stores that eliminate human contact, the popularity of shopping online (again, free from human interaction), watching movies at home rather than in theaters, keeping our earbuds in even when we go out, and the most dastardly devil of all, social media. ("Has anything ever been more misnamed than social media?" he asked.) Not included in Maher's list was another societal shift that appears not to be doing anyone any good at all … the "decline" of broadcast television.
Mental Health Crisis: Are Changes In the TV Landscape Contributing to the Problem?
