Junky TV is actually making people dumber — and more likely to support populist politicians

[rangerrebew]

 Junky TV is actually making people dumber — and more likely to support populist politicians
 
By Laura Hazard Owen @laurahazardowen July 26, 2019, 8:04 a.m.

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“They used accessible language. And that can potentially be very powerful.” A raft of new research shows that watching junky cable and other lowbrow TV is actually making people dumber — literally lowering their IQs.

In research published in the American Economic Review this month, Italian researchers showed that people with greater access to former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s trashy entertainment TV network, Mediaset, in the 1980s were much more likely to vote for Berlusconi later in later elections. Furthermore, people with greater exposure to Mediaset as children were “less cognitively sophisticated and civic-minded as adults, and ultimately more vulnerable to Berlusconi’s populist rhetoric.”

From the American Economic Association’s writeup of the research:

https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/07/junky-tv-is-actually-making-people-dumber-and-more-likely-to-support-populist-politicians/

[Sanguine]

This article is a good example of "junky" material.  IQs are not being lowered.  Now thinking ability, naivety, and ignorance may be affected, but IQs are not.  IQ is a fairly immutable, persistent measure of potential abilities.