@ tburns1, LCD panels are like venetian blinds: they close and open in rapid succession, allowing the light from the backlight to pass through and in the process creates the images we see. Most backlights have only one level of brightness (ie, full blazing power-consuming ON), even if the LCD pixels were to all be fully closed (black), so IMHO it's not hard to comprehend all those lumens the backlight is continuously furiously pumping out just being wasted, 75% of it so the article says. No, it didn't go to your eyes; it got stopped, right there at the LCD pixel in its black or closed state.
This is what inspired the UCLA people to at least get something back from all that wasted light, in the form of their photovoltaic polarizers. Many current LCDs are LED-backlit. LEDs are more amenable to some form of dynamic brightness control than their fluorescent lamp counterparts ever were, but some of their light output will still be wasted, though.
This is one area where CRTs and LCDs differ: variability in power consumption on varying degrees of picture brightness. The brighter a picture on a CRT is, the more power that TV consumes; a conventional fluorescent-lamp backlit LCD TV's power consumption scarcely varies whether the image onscreen was bright or dark, because the flourescent lamps, which consume the lion's share of the total power a typical LCD TV requires, is always full-blast ON.