Redmondkr's tagline reminds me of one of the great paraphrases of all time; i.e. "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

There's some discussion about where this statement was truncated, but after re-reading the fuller context, I found it to be eerily predictive.

Here's the full quote, in a larger context (from Notes on Journalism, 1926):

No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched 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 ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is folly. They dislike ideas, for ideas make them uncomfortable. The tabloids, seeking to force such things upon them, will inevitably alarm them and lose their trade. The journalism of the future that is, the mob journalism will move in the direction that I have indicated.

Cynical, sure. Elitist, even - in a PT Barnum-esque manner, at the very least. (And if you think that this is rough, try reading the unsparing critique of The South*, "Sahara of the Bozart." Chilling. It's almost as though he'd gotten a glimpse of the rise of the Armey/Gingrich GOP that governs much of our discourse today.)

I wonder what he'd make of this new era of "citizen journalism," one in which the "masses of plain people" have the one-click means to broadcast their ideas, such as they are, to the entire world**.

* Sample:

"One observes [in the American South] the curious effects of an old tradition of truculence upon a population now merely pushful and impudent, of an old tradition of chivalry upon a population now quite without imagination. The old repose is gone. The old romanticism is gone. The philistinism of the new type of town-boomer Southerner is not only indifferent to the ideals of the Old South; it is positively antagonistic to them. That philistinism regards human life, not as an agreeable adventure, but as a mere trial of rectitude and efficiency. It is overwhelmingly utilitarian and moral. It is inconceivably hollow and obnoxious."

** Cheerily, I do not exempt myself and my often embittered polemics from this statement.