This way of thinking and giving meaning to one’s life and society in terms of stories and narratives is universal over all cultures, and is in our basic “wiring” as human beings. It is part of what we call “common sense.” And it is the way most of the college students that NSF and I talked to had “learned science”–as isolated cases, stories that would be retrieved to deal with a similar situation, not as a system of inter related arguments about what we think we know and how well we think we know it.
Television is all about stories, and so a person indoctrinated by television has most of their knowledge based on stories, which they call common sense.