A New Age of Stupidity?

Are we in the midst of a new age of stupidity?  I'm prompted to ask by the plethora of media articles I see now with headlines assuring readers that they'll 'explain' the endings of various films or recent TV episodes.  I mean, what?  Are modern films and TV series so complicated that they are incomprehensible without someone who is apparently very clever to explain them to viewers?  The fact that it is journalists providing these 'explanations' seems to rule this out, though.  Or maybe that is the problem, that the journalists writing about modern media have trouble understanding it that they have to come up with these articles as a means of trying to unravel it al to their own satisfaction.  Alternatively, audiences have grown so stupid that they no longer understand such things as plotting or character development, or even dramatic devices like foreshadowing, irony, flashbacks etc.  Either that, or we are back to the problem lying with the shows themselves - are they so poorly conceived and written that they are incomprehensible to the average viewer?  Personally, I suspect that it is the journalists with the problem, who assume that if someone as clever as them can't understand this stuff, then the average thicko viewer certainly won't be able to.

Certainly, this low estimation of the intelligence of readers is manifested elsewhere in the media - just look at the way much of the press relentlessly push crude right-wing propaganda in an attempt to frame debates, whether they be about Brexit, Black Lives Matter or the pandemic.  But to get back to the point with regard to the way in which the media reports on TV and films, look no further than TV reschedulings for a prime example of their assuming stupidity on the part of their readers.  Just about every time an episode of a soap opera is rescheduled to make way for live football or some other event, you get the papers pushing out online articles with headlines along the lines of '(insert soap opera title here) CANCELLED!  FANS OUTRAGED!'  Except that everyone knows that it hasn't been cancelled, an episode has merely been moved to a different date or time to accommodate schedule changes.  Fans most certainly aren't outraged as, unlike these journalists apparently, they've read the schedules or listened to the announcements made after the previous episode.  The headlines, obviously, are click bait, but click bait predicated upon the idea that their readers are stupid.  All of which begs the question of just why those readers keep reading these media sources which are clearly so dismissive of them?