First, the destructive effects of having the media cartels lobbying for restriction of freedom in the name of protection of 'intellectual property'; those are sufficiently well known that I probably don't have to elaborate on them here.
Second, modern media are junk food for the mind, exploits for security vulnerabilities in our motivation systems. It's not easy to pick up on this, because e.g. watching a movie seems to make you happier for the couple of hours while you're watching it; what you don't notice is that it rewires your brain so that the entire rest of your life is that little bit less happy. Studies have shown that, taking both prevalence and magnitude of the effect into account, watching television is the single strongest determining factor in quality of life, with the effect being monotonic: the less television you watch, the happier you are. At least one study corrected for confounding influences by comparing otherwise similar neighborhoods in Third World cities where television had become available versus where it had not, and the effect was striking: where television goes, quality of life takes a nosedive.
Couldn't book-reading also be similar? Both book-reading and TV-watching take the participant out of the facets of reality and immerses them into another world.
Granted, some could argue that book-reading is an intellectual activity because our brain is processing language, but I'm not so sure reading Nora Roberts could be considered an intellectual activity (nothing against Roberts, but the type of people who seem to read her book don't seem the intellectual type).
