Friday, January 31, 2020

"...they’re not as smart as the people they mock. Not even close."

In the Ace of Spades blog, Buck Throckmorton writes,
Following the Don Lemon/Rick Wilson incident in which CNN journalists mocked working-class Trump voters as stupid people intimidated by reading and geography, Ace explained that journalists are people of average intelligence who fetishize being high IQ – because most of them are not.

I’d like to expand on that and state that the average tradesman is much more intelligent than the average journalist – especially at STEM skills. If any of those snotty journalists ever actually observed the tradesmen who make our lives possible, they would be shocked to learn how much math and science is required to do their jobs. Carpenters, plumbers, and electricians are employing science and math in their jobs all day long. Can you imagine a journalist trying to understand amperes? Of course they couldn’t. Yet because they can identify Ukraine on a map they think they’re smarter than an electrician.

Here is just one example of how a journalist can skate through college without having to be academically challenged at all in science or math: A student can get a degree in journalism at the University of Texas’ “prestigious” School of Journalism without taking a single math class nor a meaningful science class. There is a whopping requirement of one Math class (3 hours), but the journalism student has the option of substituting it with Educational Psychology, Sociology, or African Diaspora Studies. The requirement for 6 hours of Science can be satisfied with a combination of Astronomy, Nutrition, and Geography. (I verified this at the University of Texas’ Moody College of Communication web site regarding the 2019-2020 year curriculum.)

So bravo to our journalism students. While they’re making “A”s in Educational Psychology and learning how to find Ukraine on the map, nursing student are studying Physiology and Microbiology, and electricians are studying joules and volts. Oh, and let’s not forget machine operators. They’re skillfully operating backhoes, excavators, cranes and such, while the stars of CNN need assistance to change the battery in their personal groomers before going on air to insult those machine operators.

No, not only are journalists not as smart as they pretend to be, they’re not as smart as the people they mock. Not even close.

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