Virtually all current theories of the medium come down to this simple statement. As a rule, this conclusion is delivered with a melancholy undertone. Four principal theories can be distinguished.

The manipulation thesis points to an ideological dimension. It sees in television above all an instrument of political domination. The medium is understood as a neutral vessel, which pours out opinions over a public thought of as passive. Seduced, unsuspecting viewers are won over by the wire-pullers, without ever realizing what is happening to them.

The imitation thesis argues primarily in moral terms. According to it, television consumption leads above all to moral dangers. Anyone who is exposed to the medium becomes habituated to libertinism, irresponsibility, crime, and violence. The private consequences are blunted, callous, and obstinate individuals; the public consequences are the loss of social virtues and general moral decline. This form of critique draws, as is obvious at first glance, on traditional, bourgeois sources. The motifs that recur in this thesis can be identified as far back as the eighteenth century in the vain warnings that early cultural criticism sounded against the dangers of reading novels.

More recent is the simulation thesis. According to it, the viewer is rendered incapable of distinguishing between reality and fiction. The primary reality is rendered unrecognizable or replaced by a secondary, phantom-like reality.

All of these converge in the stupefaction thesis. According to it, watching television not only undermines the viewers' ability to criticize and differentiate, along with the moral and political fiber of their being, but also impairs their overall ability to perceive. Television produces, therefore, a new type of human being, who can, according to taste, be imagined as a zombie or a mutant.

All these theories are rather unconvincing. Their authors consider proof to be superfluous. Even the minimal criterion of plausibility does not worry them at all. To mention just one example, no one has yet succeeded in putting before us even a single viewer who was incapable of telling the difference between a family quarrel in the current soap opera and one at his or her family's breakfast table. This doesn't seem to bother the advocates of the simulation thesis.