The Guardian reports on dumbing-down in science reporting, and makes some excellent points. On the reasoning behind the practice:

Why? Because papers think you won’t understand the “science bit”, all stories involving science must be dumbed down, leaving pieces without enough content to stimulate the only people who are actually going to read them – that is, the people who know a bit about science. Compare this with the book review section, in any newspaper. The more obscure references to Russian novelists and French philosophers you can bang in, the better writer everyone thinks you are. Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. Imagine the fuss if I tried to stick the word “biophoton” on a science page without explaining what it meant. I can tell you, it would never get past the subs or the section editor. But use it on a complementary medicine page, incorrectly, and it sails through.

But I think it’s all part of a larger point – it’s almost as if intellectualism and knowledgeability have become qualities to be actively avoided, rather than embraced. The broadsheets (including The Guardian, after a fashion) are reinventing themselves as tabloids, television has never been quite as vacuous and insipid as it is today (although thankfully it’s still (apparently) vastly better than most US networks), and even my beloved Radio 4 seems to have lost a little of its edge recently.

When did it become cool to be clueless? And why?