When I read Fahrenheit 451 for a junior high book report, I apparently missed the author’s intended message along with the rest of the world. I could have sworn it was about The Man denying otherwise intellectually thirsty people of the books they loved.

It turns out that the “firemen” were just cleaning up a mess of old literature that had already become irrelevant due to the rise of television and the population’s apathy toward books.

from LA Weekly:

Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.
…
Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.