Ivy League Prof Sifts Through BS

Morley Safer Talks To Scholars Studying The Subject Of Bull

(CBS)  Surveying pop culture, Penny has concluded that North Americans are so inundated with BS that, like fish in water, they don’t realize it’s there.

"Paris Hilton’s dog has a book. It’s bad enough that someone like Paris Hilton gets a book, but when her Chihuahua gets a publishing deal?" asks Penny. "I mean, we’re not in the language of Shakespeare any more."

Her own BS detector works overtime, sounding the alarm at drug commercials, where you’re never sure if the BS is in the claim, or the disclaimer.

And she finds BS aplenty on Wall Street, where, after all, the resident symbol of hope is a bull, where the once mighty are sometimes led off in handcuffs, and where manias like the boom in dot-com Internet stocks periodically go bust, burying many a hapless investor in the bull’s-you-know-what.

"If you’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing a business plan from the Internet boom, you will see that what they planned to do was 'incentivize synergy paradigms,'" says Penny. "Now, I have no idea what that means. These fantastically un-understandable business plans, which were impressive because people couldn’t understand them. That’s why people are impressed by jargon, because they don’t get it."

"What about the news business? A big BS factor?" asks Safer.

"Well, you’ve been in the news business longer than I’ve been alive. So you know, you tell me," says Penny, laughing. "Does it seem fluffier to you? Does it seem flashier to you? Does it seemed dumbed down to you?"

Penny is especially scornful of the way the 24-hour, all-news-all-the-time phenomenon thrives on meaningless public spectacles starring the likes of Scott Peterson, Robert Blake and particularly, Michael Jackson.

"You have thousands of reporters from all over the world standing in front of that courthouse every day for the two minutes when he comes in with his parasol handler," says Penny. "And they shoot that. And then for the rest of the day they talk about, 'Oh, it’s a media circus. It’s a circus!' It’s like, well, who made it a media circus?"