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2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumFalse facts and the conservative distortion machine: It’s much more than just Fox News
Social scientists use "knowledge distortion" index to test partisanship and reality. Guess who is wrong most often?PAUL ROSENBERG
Citizens are misinformedoften badly so. Its not just that they lack good informationwhich would merely make them uninformedthey have plenty of bad information that leads them to believe untrue things. Or more likely the other way aroundthey believe untrue things, and that leads them to collecteven inventbad information to flesh out what they already believe.
This was vividly illustrated by 1991 study which found that the more people watched TV during the first Gulf War, the less they knew about fundamental issues and facts, even as they were more likely to support the war. Wanting to believe that the U.S. was involved in a noble cause, for example, only 13 percent knew that when Iraq first threatened to invade Kuwait, the U.S. said it would take no action, while 65 percent falsely knew that the U.S. said it would support Kuwait militarily.
But the problem is hardly limited to this one example, or to issues of war and peace more generally. Misinformation in public life isnt the exception, its the rule, and researchers have been grappling with that fact, and its implications, for some time now. A new study published in Social Science Quarterly employs a knowledge distortion index and looks at two competing explanations for why this is soone more top-down, the other more bottom-upusing three Washington state initiatives from the 2006 general election cycle to examine the dynamics of what is going on in this particular sort of political environment.
The study, How Voters Become Misinformed: An Investigation of the Emergence and Consequences of False Factual Beliefs, found that voters values and partisanship had the strongest associations with distorted beliefs, which then influenced voting choices. Self-reported levels of exposure to media and campaign messages played a surprisingly limited role, despite the presence of significantly mistaken facts, which were used to help construct the knowledge distortion index.
more
http://www.salon.com/2014/08/18/false_facts_and_the_conservative_distortion_machine_its_much_more_than_just_fox_news/
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False facts and the conservative distortion machine: It’s much more than just Fox News (Original Post)
DonViejo
Aug 2014
OP
underpants
(182,788 posts)2. I call it "identity (marketing) politics"
If you are _____ then you should vote _____
What you drive. How you grew up. All kinds of factors but basically let you pigeon hole yourself so you don't have to be campaigned to leaving resources to the undecided. This article was more about processing information but it is sorta the same.
Fascinating read.