News for Morons Many readers have no doubt heard that, No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Its attributed to H.L. Mencken, one of the most influential U.S. writers of the first half of the last century. The full quotation is much more interesting: No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Mencken didnt search any records, and he certainly didnt employ any agents to do so. That is his humor talking. He merely used his incredible powers of observation to arrive at some startling but fundamental truths about the world we live in. Its worth reading the entire Notes on Journalism, from which this quote came. As you read them, remember that Mencken wrote that 88 years ago. He explained that tabloid journalism could be immensely profitable if it were written entirely in one-syllable words, contained no news that morons couldnt understand, and had pictures like those in a first-grade school reader. All ideas are beyond the masses, he said, and they are only able to comprehend politics as a combat between two people, Person A and Person B. In his Notes on Democracy, also from 1926, Mencken wrote that people of independence and intelligence cant get elected, because the voters find them offensive. The result is that the House of Representatives was (at the time) comparable in intelligence, information and integrity to a gang of bootleggers. How politics has changed since then! We now have leading politicians (Obama, Merkel, Putin, Babiš, Kalousek) who are successful because they are smart enough to know exactly how to speak to morons. Erik Best This commentary appeared first in the subscription newsletter Friday Edition. Přečtěte si také: Friday Edition: Poznámky o novinařině fsfinalword.cz/?page=archive&day=2014-05-30 Friday Edition: Revoluce ve vzdělávání fsfinalword.cz/?page=archive&show=1&day=2014-5-23 Friday Edition: Prázdné sliby prezidentů a premiérů fsfinalword.cz/?page=archive&show=1&day=2014-5-16
Posted on: Sat, 31 May 2014 06:04:46 +0000
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