Two University of Chicago economists reviewed some 1960s data and found that TV watching didn't cause kids' test scores to drop.

Some excerpts from the Feb. 27 NYT story:

Matthew Gentzkow, 30, an assistant professor of economics at the university's graduate school of business, and Jesse M. Shapiro, 26, a research fellow, have waded into controversial territory that is usually the domain of psychologists and educators.

"The notion that television has terrible effects on very young children is widely believed and discussed," said Mr. Gentzkow. He noted that he was not predisposed to a "television is good" argument; he even conducted an earlier study that found that television lowered voter turnout.

Most studies that find negative effects from television compare groups of children who watch television to those who do not, even though the economic situations of the two groups are in all likelihood very different, Mr. Gentzkow said. The new study, however, was based on what the authors call a "natural experiment" that resulted from the way television was introduced in the United States in the late 1940's and early 1950's, when some cities got TV service five years ahead of others.

Data from cities where preschoolers were exposed to the new technology, and data from cities where they were not, was correlated with test scores from about 300,000 students nationwide in 1965, as collected in the Coleman Report, a survey done under the Civil Rights Act. The study also looked at test scores from pre- and post-TV age groups within cities.

The result showed "very little difference and if anything, a slight positive advantage" in test scores for children who grew up watching TV early on, compared to those who did not, said Mr. Shapiro. In nonwhite households and those where English was a second language or the mother had less than a high school education, TV's positive effect was more marked. ...

Elizabeth A. Vandewater, associate professor of human development at the University of Texas and director of the Center for Research on Interactive Technology, Television and Children, praised the new study for adding "more evidence that television is not uniformly evil or bad," but said that it ignored "a host of evidence that shows that content matters a lot."

She said that "there is a huge body of evidence that educational television" can be good for children, as well as strong evidence that "violent content is related to antisocial aggressive behavior."

Mr. Gentzkow said the work had nothing to say about how television affects a child's focus, aggression or other behaviors, and that it merely looked at academic outcomes.

I feel vindicated! As a kid, I grew up on a diet of Get Smart, Gilligan's Island, Hogan's Heroes, Bewitched, Green Acres, Lost in Space and the Beverly Hillbillies.

If TV is as bad for kids as many people think, I should have an IQ in the 60s. As it is, my IQ is at least 10 or 15 per cent higher than that.

So there. Take that, TV haters.