Neil Postman, 72, critic of TV industry

By Associated Press, 10/9/2003

NEW YORK -- Neil Postman, a New York University professor and author who criticized the television industry for treating serious issues as entertainment, died Sunday of lung cancer. He was 72.

A faculty member at NYU for 39 years, Mr. Postman founded the Steinhardt School of Education's program in media ecology in 1971 and chaired the Department of Culture and Communication until 2002.

Mr. Postman argued in his 1985 book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business," that television has such resonance it diminishes our ability to take the world seriously.

In "The Disappearance of Childhood," from 1994, he complained that television homogenizes the worlds of children and adults by giving children access to vast amounts of information that was once reserved for adults.

Mr. Postman wrote 20 books and more than 200 articles including pieces for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic and Le Monde. He was a contributing editor to The Nation.