Now yeah, I'm a college dropout I suppose (I say I've suspended my studies but they've been suspended for years now) but it's funny that the BBC tends to hire people that have a journalistic education to work for BBC News. You might get the occasional crossover from news to entertainment (Jeremy Paxman hosting University Challenge) but usually not the other way around. Another Jeremy who has been associated with the BBC - Jeremy Clarkson - is a journalist but not college educated (he didn't go, trained in journalism from working local newspapers) and his career at the Beeb was more entertainment based. He writes opinion columns - and yeah his politics are right wing and somewhat libertarian.

The problem is that in the USA you have Limbaugh, Hannity and Beck being touted as "news" whereas they're actually spouting their opinions... and IMO their broadcasts should be labeled as such - opinion and not news.

Always has, from what I can tell. Those folks believe the pinheads cited in that graphic are better at their jobs because they got away from the liberal/marxist/elitist eggheads before brainwashing took effect.

eom

This isn't new. It is more militant, but you can see it from essentially the beginning of the republic. It sits right in the same pews as the fundamentalist and evangelical Christians. I'd blame Christianity, and there is a strong streak of anti-reason in lots of Christian thought, but it's not actually an article of faith. It's a manifestation of a really deep fear on some peoples parts that they aren't in control. Applying reason and intellect to a problem may not yield a simple answer. If you're not willing to think about a problem yourself relying on the thinking of people from the past is much easier, or better yet, relying on what someone tells you people in the past thought.

Charles Pierce had it right, those 3 doofi have moved the ratings needle. Popularity has replaced fact and evidence. You don't have to be educated, that only gives you a tool set to work with. The followers of the cult of stupid only need a hammer because everything is a nail. Welcome to idiot America.

Religion BEGETS anti-intellectualism. Especially western religions.

It is a survival mechanism. Intellectuality negates many, if not most, of the rationales FOR religion.

If you are using those religious rationales against all the "others" to maintain your sense of superiority (which seems to be the primary purpose of religion here in the US), one gets rather testy when confronted with alternative options.

Of course, the ultimate superiority stance is MY god is better than YOUR god. (There is really no come-back to THAT one...) Never mind that it is alleged to only be the ONE god.

Logic be damned. (I personally opt for none. There is no rational justification for deism, period.)

Quite frankly, planet earth has a cancer. And it is human.

And humanity has a cancer, and it is religion.

My sympathies are with the planet. Nature usually wins, in the end. Covid-19 may be the surgical process to excise one, while simultaneously taking out the other... I am NOT rooting for Covid-19 to win, but it may give us some focus... AND help to rid ourselves of the some of that anti-intelluctualism that is CAUSING it to run rampant.

I don't know if that is a "glass half full" or a "glass half empty"...

Beats the heck out of spending that money in political ads, trying to lay some facts on people who we failed to educate in the first place.

... of his ilk are also college dropouts.

a college education would provide them. They are better off to depart before being dulled, as Gates and Jobs did.

People think that Bill Gates is a rags to riches story.

I don't even pretend to aspire to the kind of rags Bill Gates was born to.

Dad top Lawyer in Seattle.
Mom from Old Seattle family.
Attended top private school in the state.

He's not a stupid man by any stretch of the imagination, but he is an example of someone who started well past third base. He's made the most of it, so good on him, but he's really not that rags to riches story.

Now they are comedians....
Has Hannity ever done a day's honest work?