To quote: “No question, anybody who has a TV in his house should know beforehand that his life is wasted. He has no chelek L’Olam Haboa. No question at all about it.”
When gedolim makes statements like this they expect them to be understood using seichel and not taken completely at face value. There is a chazal that if one learns 2 halachos per day he is guaranteed olam habah. Does this mean that if I learn 2 halachos every day and then go and purposely violate them I will still go to olam habah because, after all, I learned 2 halachos per day? Of course not. The point in the segula of learning 2 halachos per day is that if one does so he will, over the course of time, come to know a lot of halacha and will then hopefully follow it. It is the following of the halacha, the doing of the mitzvos properly and the avoiding of the aveiros, along with the zechus of his daily learning that gets a person to olam habah.
Same thing here. It is the consequences of owning the TV that R’ Miller ZT”L claims will make one lose their olam habah. If I own a TV but I and my family never use it, I am sure that R’ Miller will agree that it will not affect my Olam Habah.
I do not know whether or not it is true that the Rav had a TV in his house, but if he did, he probably did not waste away his life watching it, nor did he use it to watch things that he shouldn’t be watching. He was probably also very careful not to allow the other members of his household to let the TV ruin their lives. A gadol like the Rav was on the level to control himself and his household in this way and is therefore not subject to R’ Miller’s claim that he will lose his Olam Habah. It is therefore not a stira to say that the Rav had a TV and that R’ Miller said that a TV takes away Olam Habah. Seichel will tell you that R’ Miller was speaking to the hamon am, not to yichidim like the Rav.
I see a few problems with an individual owning a TV.
First of all, even if everything he is watching is completely appropriate, it can still be a big waste of time. The time spent watching TV will take away from learning Torah and doing other mitzvos which will cause a person to have a much smaller chelek in the next world than they would have otherwise.
Secondly, there is the content itself which has deteriorated over the years. I used to enjoy occasionally watching sports but nowadays there is so much shmutz even in that. The commercials are all completely inappropriate and even during the games themselves the cameras will often focus on inappropriate things.
Theoretically, if the content was clean and the time spent is minimal it would be OK to own and watch a TV. But, our gedolim know that this is not the case. The content is not clean and watching TV can be addictive. You might start out watching one baseball game per month, it will then progress to one per week then one per day. Then you will want to watch the pre-game and post-game and Sportscenter as well and eventually it will take up all of your time and you will waste away your life. The yetzer hara for this addiction is even greater when it comes to inappropriate programming.
There may be some yichidim who have enough control over themselves and their life to be able to resist the temptations and use the TV appropriately. But, even for those people who can control themselves, the chances are that they cannot control their families. Having a TV in the house might be OK for these people if they were living alone but if they have children it is another story. It sounds to me from the discussion above that the Rav had a TV in his house during his older years. He used it to keep up with news and sports so that he could better connect with the people in the world including his grandchildren. From this I conclude that at the time he did not have young children in his house to worry about them using the TV inappropriately. It was also a time period when TV was not as bad as it is nowadays. I highly doubt that he had cable, etc. If he did have a TV he used it for occasional news and sports only and even that was all done leshem shamayim.