WB: Dumb and Dumber – Moon of Alabama

October 13, 2006

WB: Dumb and Dumber

Billmon:

[T]he difference between the international and domestic editions of Newsweek (as well as its crosstown rival, Time) is like the difference between the mind of an international business executive wizzing across the Atlantic at 35,000 feet and that of a retarded chimpanzee thrashing around in own feces at the zoo — except I think even the domestic edition of Newsweek is probably a little highbrow for Bush.

Dumb and Dumber

Posted by b on October 13, 2006 at 16:26 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Just to note: Wonkette is currently a he. And why are you so hard on USA Today?

Posted by: b | Oct 13 2006 16:30 utc | 1

There’s a reason I get the Economist and the FT nowadays. Only US publications I get are technical.
Hooray for the Brits and non-dumbed down information.

Posted by: tzs | Oct 13 2006 17:48 utc | 2

why are you so hard on USA Today?
It’s a personal issue.

Posted by: billmon | Oct 13 2006 17:55 utc | 3

@b:

A guess: USA Today was the first mass-market publication to reach the “Americans really are this stupid” level. It was the FOX News of its day. Without it, we probably wouldn’t have Newsweek the way it is. (It might still be bad — there were plenty of mass-market publications before USA Today that assumed their audiences were dumb, but we probably wouldn’t see the approach we see now, where it’s just assumed that the reader is an average citizen out of 1984.)

Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | Oct 13 2006 20:49 utc | 4

I don’t (because the Internet is better), but I used to tell myself that if I ever subscribed to a glossy news weekly, it would have to be Newsweek because they donated copies of the international edition, every week, to us volunteers when I was in the Peace Corps. Hella good advertising.
Oh, how I looked forward to that magazine. Much of what I know about what happened from 1995-1998 came from Newsweek intnl. I know very little about the Lewinsky thing, for example.
Something I’d forgotten about until just now: a thin sliver of what I know about those years came via shortwave from The Utterly Hilarious Radio Pyongyang English Broadcast. If you don’t believe me, don’t worry–I wouldn’t believe me, either.

Posted by: &y | Oct 13 2006 23:24 utc | 5

They dumb down books as well, especially children’s books. Compare the UK and US versions of a UK kids’ book and the American version is often horribly bowdlerized. If you want a conspiracy theory, there’s the smoking gun – and like most real conspiracies, it’s happening in plain view.

Posted by: Tantalus | Oct 14 2006 2:01 utc | 6

It’s no conspiracy, it’s just capitalism at work. These operations are there to make money. They can make more money offering America low-brow pablum than by offering them challenging journalism.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Oct 14 2006 6:36 utc | 7

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