You have made a false dichotomy between 'intellectualism' and being 'genuinely smart'. The fact that you're allergic to the word itself goes some distance in proving my claim.
Intellectualism properly understood is not confined to an artfags' debate, or to a bitter, wordy political feud. It also refers to every researcher and interested citizen that is in a community, plugging away (often in a depoliticized fashion-imagine that!) at their various areas of study-math, science, engineering, art, philosophy. Most of these people are nice enough, and the reason why we don't hear about them is the same reason we don't hear much news about a group of people quietly doing good work-frankly, it's really boring. But the WORD 'intellectual' automatically and frequently only conjures up the NEGATIVE associations in American culture, as you've just shown. Your allergy to reading a long post, as well as your reliance on anecdotal evidence (auto-death), are just gravy at this point.
3> just no. Cable news means precisely cable news (MSNBC, CNN, beholden to finance and ratings-grabbers), although yes, Fox is the worst among them.