Idiocy versus assholery
The title of an excerpt of my book (at salon.com, here) suggests that the good folks at Fox News are “idiots.” Perhaps the editors wanted to avoid using “asshole” in the title, but I’d say assholes and idiots are pretty different, even worlds apart.
There is indeed a general similarity between idiocy and assholery, at least when we are stuck dealing with it: we don’t feel there’s a way of getting through, of getting someone to see what we think one should easily understand.
On the other hand, one can be an idiot simply by being stupid, and I’d say very few successful assholes are stupid: it takes a very high level of social intelligence to successfully exploit grey areas of social social life and fend of angry reprisals. Assholes become and remain assholes because it works for them, and it can only work for them if they have the savvy to more or less reliably pull it off.
Actually, Fox News is a case in point here: it takes a certain kind of manipulative genius to do what Fox so successfully does. Are they assholes? Yes (or so I’d argue, by arguing that the essential public function of the media doesn’t permit doing what they do.) Are they idiots? Not at all.
