The only way for a pundit to assemble a large enough audience to succeed in prime time is to pander to their audience's ideological sensibilities and to dumb down their content to the lowest common denominator.
Bowers then says:
The notion that popularity is earned through stupidity can't die a fast enough death. Not that the notion is actually dying, just that it is an idea that needs to go away. The implication of such sentiments is that people are generally pretty dumb, or at least dumber than the person doing the evaluating. It is fundamentally a statement of elitism over the masses. [...]
As someone who has spent several years studying avant-garde poetry in graduate school and trying to make a living, at least in part, by acquiring a large audience for my puny little independent websites, I can honestly say that a hell of a lot of brain power are required for both. I mean, if it was easy to get hundreds of thousands of people to listen to you, then why wouldn't just about everyone do it?
Alright, a few things.
1. People are generally dumb. How is this even arguable? Just look at our culture. Nobody reads. Everyone is fat. Nancy Grace is super popular. "Deal Or No Deal" is a sensation. Bush had 30% approval at the end of 2008.
2. The first and third bolded sections are total strawmen. Nobody's saying Rachel Maddow is dumb or that what she does is easy to do. The critique is that the substance of her show is very fluffy, which it needs to be in order to sustain a high viewership. Now, I happen to disagree a bit with the notion that we should be viewing all cable shows as one huge, dumbed-down circus. Maddow, more than nearly any other talking head, does legimitately attempt to have moments of worthwhile political debate and discourse. Contrast this with Hannity, who invites Tony Dungy on to talk about how awesome Jesus is, takes a commercial break, and then starts lamenting Obama's new haircut with John Bolton. But that brings me to my third point.
3. Cable talking head shows are universally retarded. I watch them fairly regularly, because I find Keith Olbermann jerking off into Richard Wolffe's mouth to be entertaining, but that does not mean I learn much of anything from them. Is Bowers really trying to make the argument that these shows aren't dumbed down to rake in 1M viewers per night? It doesn't even have to be a criticism of the audience, since I'm sure Rachel Maddow's audience overlaps heavily with the liberal blog readers who, while I would not deign to lavish the term "smart" on them, are obviously considerably more politically informed than your average person. But cable news, by its very format, is required to be dumbed-down. Or else people wouldn't watch it, because it's 9:00 P.M. on a Wednesday and nobody wants to be read a Greenwald diatribe. Or a Nate Silver exposition on approval ratings. Or a Tyler Cowen take on the economy. Instead, they want the condensed, easily-digestable, and unabashedly partisan take on things. And that's what they get from Maddow, Olbermann, and Matthews.
For future reference, here's a tip: If the economy is in the shitter, unemployment is about to be 9%, and we're ramping up our war in Afghanistan, and the show you are watching begins by spending 10 minutes talking about fucking pirates, then the show is probably dumbed-down.
EDIT: Look at Rush Limbaugh. I could obviously never do what he does in a million years. It takes considerable talent. But that doesn't mean that the content of his show is smart. That just means that he's good at what he does. Good to the tune of millions and millions of listeners.
EDIT: Define irony: This. A post by OpenLeft's very own Paul Rosenberg where he says the following:
But it's doubtful she had any idea what she was in for with these journalists, touted for explaining economics in terms "regular people" can understand--Gosh, and here I thought Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, and dozens, if not hundreds of other real economists already did that.
Now, obviously Rosenberg is going for a little reverse-snark with the "regular people" in quotes. But the fact remains that Krugman could not write his columns in econspeak and expect to hold his job. He needs to explain things in a short amount of words and in terms that normal Times readers can understand. A.k.a., he needs to dumb it down. I'm sure he's ignoring overly-complicated things and oversimplifying research and trends. His columns aren't going to be winning him any Nobel Prizes. But that's good for me! Because compared to Krugman, I'm the dumb one, and sometimes I need stuff to be explained to me like I'm a six-year-old.
And yet Krugman's readers are clearly square in the middle of the Ivy League, liberal elite, Starbucks-sippin', Amtrak corridor crowd. Does Bowers think that if you took the other 70% of this country and had them read Krugman's columns, they would understand a single word? I don't. Why? Because those people are dumb. And they need Krugman's already-dumbed-down article to be dumbed-down even further. And that's what cable news is.
