I wish I believed that sampling error largely accounts for the media's belief that people like dumbed down stuff. Sadly, I think folks are just interested in kidnapped white girls, and back pain. But look; It's a big country, with a lot of media, and a healthy capacity to create niche markets. If a single outlet did intelligent well -- and I think NPR comes pretty close on this score -- there's certainly a large audience for them to tap into. But one of the problems with the news networks is that they're all engaged in a positional competition to lead in the ratings, so you have a slew of networks doing, broadly, the same thing (Fox obviously introduces an ideological variation on this formula, but they're far more similar to CNN than they are different). But those networks aren't trying to outrun MTV, or Comedy Central, or TNT. It's understood that those channels do different things and appeal to different audiences. If MSNBC, or one of the others decided that they, too, were going to do a different thing, and appeal to a different niche, and measure their growth only against the last quarter and their profitability only against their own balance sheet, they could wander off in another direction and possibly build a whole new audience. But insofar as they're competing for the same audience -- the one that likes kidnapped white girls in Aruba -- they're going to have to run stories on kidnapped white girls in Aruba, and everything is going to look and sound like everything else.
