Americans at large believe all sorts of things that are demonstrably untrue; if you’d care for a weaker version of that statement, they believe a great many things that put them at odds with the experts in the relevant fields. (I refer readers habitually to Bryan Caplan’s excellent contribution on this subject, The Myth of the Rational Voter.) That Fox News’s heavily conservative viewership turns out to be relatively skeptical of received opinion when that opinion conflicts with their understanding of the world is utterly unsurprising. What’s surprising is that in the bullet list above, they were mostly right to do so. ... Ironically, these “Fox News Viewers Are Stupid!” stories are little more than a large and intense exercise in confirmation bias, indulgences of the very thing that the people who push them attribute to their antagonists. The Left has learned over the years that winning debates is difficult but discrediting people and institutions is relatively easy. You point the finger and yell “racist!” or “stupid!” or “stupid racist!” long enough and loud enough and it will start to stick. And for a long time, the Left did not have to do very much debating, because there was no Fox News, no Rush Limbaugh et al., and no conservative alternatives online. Now there are, and so the Left’s most pressing order of business is the delegitimization of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh et al., and conservative alternatives online. And if that doesn’t work, Harry Reid is ready to repeal the First Amendment, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is ready to see you locked up for your political views. And when that happens, you can bet that somebody will publish a study finding that it’s the only rational thing to do.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 21:12:55 +0000
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