Sid Rosenberg called Americans stupid. I had a different explanation.

When I introduced Sid Rosenberg on Wednesday’s Rush Hour, I gave him the kind of introduction I believe he has earned. Sid is one of those rare broadcasters who can sit across from world leaders in the morning and still sound like the guy you grew up arguing with in Brooklyn.

He was genuinely touched. In fact, he told me, “I swear to God, Bo, I was waiting for Rush Limbaugh to walk inside the room.”

Well, that’s one way to make my afternoon.

Rush would have appreciated Sid. Not necessarily because they would have agreed on everything, but because Sid has something increasingly rare in broadcasting: a personality that hasn’t been sanded down by consultants. You know exactly where he stands, and you don’t need a committee to interpret it.

And during our conversation, we found something to disagree about.

It was October 7, the anniversary of the horrific Hamas attack on Israel. I remembered being on the air that day, speaking with my friend Joel Rosenberg, who was in Israel as the news unfolded. You could hear the sirens in the background. Those sounds are difficult to forget.

Sid made an important point about the anniversary. October 7 wasn’t simply a terrible day that ended when the calendar turned to October 8. The consequences continued through the hostage crisis, the war and the grief of families whose lives were permanently changed.

We talked about Iran, Israel and the larger conflict. Sid argued passionately that Iran’s hostility isn’t limited to Israel. He pointed to the regime’s long record of threatening America and supporting terrorist organizations, and he defended President Trump’s willingness to confront that threat.

Then Sid said something that caught my attention.

He argued that Americans complaining about higher gasoline prices were too short-sighted, too angry and, in his words, too stupid to appreciate what Trump was doing.

Now, Sid is my friend. I respect him enormously. But I stopped him right there.

I wasn’t prepared to call Americans stupid.

I told him that we have an enormous media apparatus presenting events through a particular political narrative. People watch television, read headlines, scroll through social media and form impressions based on what they’re seeing. If they’re not getting the whole picture, why should we assume the problem is their intelligence?

That’s a distinction worth making.

There’s a difference between being uninformed and being misinformed. There’s also a difference between disagreeing with a policy and failing to understand why that policy exists. An American can recognize Iran as a serious threat and still worry about the price of gasoline. Those concerns aren’t mutually exclusive, and dismissing them doesn’t make the case for confronting Iran any stronger.

If you want people to support a difficult policy, explain the stakes. Make the argument. Answer the questions.  That exchange led naturally into another subject I wanted Sid to address.

Earlier in the day, someone had repeated to me the old antisemitic claim that Jews control the media and that people aren’t allowed to criticize Israel.

I’ve heard versions of that claim throughout my life. And I asked Sid a question that seems rather obvious: If Jews control the media and criticism of Israel is supposedly forbidden, how do we explain the extraordinary volume of criticism directed at Israel every single day?

You can find fierce criticism of the Israeli government on television, online, in newspapers and on college campuses. People argue about Israel constantly, sometimes with extraordinary hostility. Whatever else anyone believes about the coverage, the idea that criticism has been silenced simply doesn’t survive contact with reality.

Sid’s answer was characteristically direct, colorful and thoroughly Brooklyn. He rejected the premise and argued that much of the American media is actually hostile toward Israel.

I don’t need to agree with every assessment Sid makes about the press to recognize the larger point. Criticizing a government’s policies is one thing. Claiming that an entire religious or ethnic group secretly controls what everyone is permitted to say is something else entirely.

And here’s where our two conversations connect.

Whether we’re talking about Iran, Israel, Donald Trump or the Supreme Court, the public deserves more than a narrative designed to produce a predetermined reaction. People need facts, context and enough competing information to exercise their own judgment.

Rush understood that. He spent years challenging the assumptions behind the headlines and encouraging his audience to question what the media were presenting as settled truth. You didn’t have to agree with every conclusion to understand the value of examining the premise.

Sid and I also managed to wander into college football, Simon Cowell’s birthday and John Mellencamp. That’s the pleasure of having a guest who can talk about almost anything without sounding as though somebody handed him a stack of approved talking points.

At one point, a listener complained about Sid’s language. Sid explained that he was from Brooklyn and wasn’t about to start talking like somebody else to make everyone comfortable.

I had to laugh. The man had just spent part of the afternoon discussing terrorism, war and the future of Western civilization, and somebody was worried about his vocabulary.

That’s Sid Rosenberg.

But the part of our conversation that stayed with me wasn’t the language or even our disagreement over Iran. It was the question of how Americans come to believe what they believe.

I have more faith in the American people than to assume that disagreement means stupidity. Give people the facts. Tell them what you know, admit what you don’t and let them think.

And if your argument is strong enough, you won’t need to call them stupid to win it.

— Bo