With all due respect, Mr Paulson, just how dumb do you think we really are?
In a sense he is correct. The problem is more subtle and yet simpler than that and extends to academia as well.
It was expressed to me in Saigon in 1970 when I was berating a VP for CBS about the coverage of the war.
He said, and I think he was correct, that the problem was not intentional bias, but “intellectual incest”, the fact that all the newspeople talked to no one but those who see the world as they do and all their reporting reflected that.
The liberal (progressive??) mindset is that things will only get better when the greatly superior elite control everything and lead the masses (whether they want it or not, the elites know best) to a higher level and on to perfection on earth. Anything that promotes this is good, anything that doesn’t is not just wrong, it is evil. “Whatever it takes baby.”
This mindset is nothing new, from Plato’s Philosepher-king, to Rousseau, to Marx, to Obummer, it’s all the same.