There is no audience for someone like that anymore, at least not enough to make that you’re primary work.
Chomsky famously said for decades: “The average teenager would rather be at the mall than at the library”
In the wise words of the dude:
How are you going to keep her on the ranch after she’s seen ‘logjammin’
It’s an interesting conundrum though because I’d argue most of the kind of people that watched “firing line” read “the nation” and watched the PBS newshour just don’t exist at numbers that make them viable anymore
I mean the very existence of the New Statesman/Atlantic refutes that argument fairly roundly. The real issue is that these public intellectuals were generally lowering themselves to the chat show circuit in order to plug books, and allow pot-shots to be taken at their positions by the mid-brow iconoclasts that constituted American audiences and opposition figureheads at the time.
Nowadays the (ersatz) equivalents that come to mind are generally plugging away on Youtube Shorts, Podcasts and monetised platforms in lieu of structured debate or moderated talk show punditry - e.g. Jordan Peterson, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Fry and Dawkins on the 'academic' side. This has changed the consumption, the engagement, and often the context depending from what angle you consume the soundbite.
The ones on the 'political' side as neocons I barely dare to mention like George Galloway, Douglas Murray etc... so as to avoid sullying Hitch's reputation by mentioning it in the same contexts as advocates of Great Replacement and other Cultural Marxism conspiracy theories.
This is a good point and one I didn’t want to get into but it emphasizes my point:
The high brow stuff, which absolutely exists and more than ever, are not being forced on you by taste makers anymore. Cavett/Cronkite etc.. was the only thing to watch so whomever passed that filter was shown to the world.
Now it’s mingled in with all the porn, ragebait, trash so never gets really highlighted because people have a choice now and they are choosing brainrot.
Hence my point that whereas in the past you may have never thought about it but we’re “forced” to watch it because there just wasn’t anything else on. Now if someone is on a “boring” distribe about politics, people swipe to look at butts and cats because it’s easier
Chomsky famously said for decades: “The average teenager would rather be at the mall than at the library”
In the wise words of the dude:
How are you going to keep her on the ranch after she’s seen ‘logjammin’
It’s an interesting conundrum though because I’d argue most of the kind of people that watched “firing line” read “the nation” and watched the PBS newshour just don’t exist at numbers that make them viable anymore