Like many of you, I grew up with television. The TV screen in the living room showed us “I Love Lucy,” “Howdy Doody,” and “Adventures of Superman.” We saw news footage of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot to death by Jack Ruby in Dallas and saw the Beatles performing on “The Ed Sullivan show.” Television was informative and entertaining.

“Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world,” wrote Neil Postman in his “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. “He blamed television for presenting disinformation, “misleading information — misplaced, irrelevant fragmented or superficial information — information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing.”

In the 1950s and ’60s, teachers began to experience the challenge of making learning as inviting as TV. Films began to compete with blackboard lessons and books in the classroom. More recently, computer and cellphone screens compete with workbooks and textbooks.

Celebrities and sports stars now influence us Americans more than our teachers and church pastors do. Newspapers devote whole sections to sports while members of National Honor Societies and high school salutatorians and valedictorians are ignored.

So it should come as no surprise that the star of the reality show “The Apprentice” should run for president and win the 2016 presidential election. Many viewers believed that Donald Trump was the image of a successful leader: rich and powerful, able to glide down on a golden Trump Tower escalator to popular adulation with a single step. That’s how he chose to announce his run for president in 2015.

It should come as no surprise that Americans elected the star of NBC’s reality show “The Apprentice,” which ran on TV from 2004 to 2015, as their president in 2016.

It also should come as no surprise that it took two decades for John D. Miller, NBC’s former chief marketer of “The Apprentice,” to apologize this week for relentlessly promoting this show.

“Thousands of 30-second promo spots that spread the fantasy of Trump’s supposed business acumen were beamed over the airwaves to nearly every household in the country. … It was ‘fake news’ that we spread over America. … I never imagined that the picture we painted of Trump as a successful businessman would help catapult him to the White House.”

Miller confessed that he and his staff at NBC “did irreparable harm by creating the false image of Trump as a successful leader. I deeply regret that. And I regret that it has taken me so long to go public.”

Now Miller urges those planning to vote for Trump to change their minds: “If you believe that Trump will be better for you or better for the country, that is an illusion, much like ‘The Apprentice’ was. Even if you are a born-and-bred Republican, as I was, I strongly urge you to vote for Kamala Harris. The country will be better off and so will you.”

— Judy Parr resides in Holland.

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