Bias is probably the end result of the dumbing down. After all, stupid people simply gravitate to news sources which do not remind them that they are stupid.
I first noticed it when I discovered that people had forgotten the art of merging smoothly onto a freeway, and had developed the habit of being a "lookie-lou".
Would you believe that the big complaint when I was a kid was that NO ONE seemed to care when an accident happened?
I don't mean that people didn't slow down for safety's sake. Of course people slowed down to avoid getting into another accident around a collision, but no one slowed down to look and see what happened.
People actually said that "no one cared"....
some people. The response was, "It's none of my business".
Accidents on the freeway ARE none of our business, avoid the wreck and keep moving, and yet how many of us have been stuck in a bumper to bumper jam for twenty minutes, only to finally discover that it's because everyone is jamming on their brakes to stop and look at a couple of cars
all the way over on the shoulder?
People in the fast lane all the way over on the other side,
even in the opposite direction, are slamming on their brakes to see what's going on!
I've been stuck in twenty minute tie-ups because people had to look at
some guy changing a goddamn tire!
That didn't use to happen in the 50's/60's/70's or even much of the 1980's.
Somewhere around the mid to late 80's is when I started noticing the lookie-lou phenomenon, and I noticed that people had difficulty merging smoothly.
It had become a contest of dominance instead of the freeway equivalent of a graceful dance move.
I think our long slow dive into entropy began around that time, and that the two items, lookie-lous and inability to merge were the signals of the impending decline.
