Marty Kaplan
Plato took a dim view of artists. They were, he said, illusionists, imitators who fooled people into thinking that what they saw was real. A trompe l'oeil painting of a bunch of grapes could deceive a bird, who would peck at it; even if a person realized that it was a painting, at some level -- at the bird level of the human brain -- a person would still be a prisoner of that illusion. And that, in turn, was dangerous: it opened the way to all sorts of manipulation of people, because their bird-brains were accessible to artists' conjuring tricks.

Marty Kaplan
A premise behind a lot of what we do at the Lear Center is the idea that a well-educated, well-informed citizenry is good for democracy. This Jeffersonian concept -- it used to be called a "liberal" ideal, before partisan warfare made that word a left-right term -- is especially relevant to the health of society and the state of freedom in a time when entertainment casts such a strong shadow on domains like news, politics and education.

So it was striking to come across a post by Sam Rosenfeld at The American Prospect's blog TAPPED, saying this:

[T]he modern liberal emphasis on making the public somehow smarter and better informed about politics as the central means of bringing about progressive change has amounted to a catastrophic misallocation of energy.