The Abundant Smarts of Celebrity Actors, Writers and the Wealthy…according to CNN
I was taking a break and reading an article about work-at-home scams on the CNN website today when my attention was caught by the following (the writer is comparing work-at-home scams with Madoff’s ponzi scam to prove that people who get scammed aren’t necessarily gullible):
For example, many of the people who say they lost money in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme were celebrity actors, writers, wealthy people — people with abundant smarts.
Ummmmm…what? Talk about an incredible leap of logic. What, exactly, qualifies “celebrity actors, writers, wealthy people” as innately intelligent? It particularly galls me that this writer would assume that celebrities are somehow “people with abundant smarts.” For every Natalie Portman, there’s an activist like Sean Penn (who dropped out of community college). For every Jodie Foster, there’s a Drew Barrymore (who never completed high school). It drives me up a wall that people assume that just because someone is a successful actor that they are somehow more intelligent or well-educated than the average person (and yes, I understand that education != intelligence, but there are some correlations). This holds true for any group, including the wealthy or writers (just because someone has written a book or an article doesn’t make them more intelligent, nor does earning or inheriting a lot of money).
It just struck me as incredibly lazy journalism to make such an illogical assumption, even in such a soft and weak piece.
