The Republican Brain (30 page)

Welfare in fact presents a very well documented case study of conservative misinformation during the 1990s, one that seems closely parallel to the health care and global warming debates today.

In an early study (published in the year 2000) on the prevalence of falsehoods in American politics—one that stressed the then-novel distinction between being
uninformed
and believing strongly in
misinformation
—political scientist James Kuklinski and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign examined contrasting public views about the facts on this issue. Sure enough, they found that conservatives (or at any rate, those who held strong anti-welfare views) tended to be both more misinformed about welfare, and also more confident they were right in their (wrong) beliefs. In particular, welfare opponents tended to greatly exaggerate the cost of the program, the number of families on welfare, how many of them were African-American, and so on. For instance, only 7 percent of the public was on welfare at the time of the study; but those who exaggerated by answering up to 18 or 25 percent in Kuklinski's survey were highly confident they were right. Just 1 percent of the federal budget went to welfare, but those who dramatically exaggerated the number—answering up to 11 or 15 percent—were highly confident they were right. And so on.

By the time Fox News came on the air in 1996, then, the trend of providing ideological fare to conservative sophisticates—both highly engaged and confident, and also more misinformed—was already well established. Indeed, Fox's founder, the former Nixon adviser and television producer Roger Ailes, is a close friend of Rush Limbaugh's. In the 1990s, Ailes produced a television show for political radio's most popular personality. Some Fox hosts, like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, are also talk-radio stars, or were at one time—and the audiences for the two media overlap heavily. “I think that by now especially, they've become the same people,” says the University of Pittsburgh's David Barker.

None of which is to suggest that Fox isn't also guilty of
actively
misinforming viewers. It certainly is.

The litany of misleading Fox segments and snippets is quite extensive—especially on global warming, where it seems that every winter snowstorm is an excuse for more doubt-mongering. No less than Fox's Washington managing editor Bill Sammon was found to have written, in a 2009 internal staff email exposed by MediaMatters, that the network's journalists should:

. . . refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.

And global warming is hardly the only issue where Fox actively misinforms its viewers. The polling data here, from the Project on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) are very telling.

PIPA's study of misinformation in the 2010 election didn't just show that Fox News viewers were more misinformed than viewers of other channels. It also showed that watching more Fox made believing in
nine separate political misperceptions
more likely. And that was a unique effect, unlike any observed with the other news channels that were studied. “With all of the other media outlets, the more exposed you were, the less likely you were to have misinformation,” explains PIPA's director, political psychologist Steven Kull. “While with Fox, the more exposure you had, in most cases, the more misinformation you had. And that is really, in a way, the most powerful factor, because it strongly suggests they were actually getting the information from Fox.”

Indeed, this effect was even present in non-Republicans—another indicator that Fox is probably its cause. As Kull explains, “even if you're a liberal Democrat, you are affected by the station.” If you watched Fox, you were more likely to believe the nine falsehoods, regardless of your political party affiliation.

In summary, then, the “science” of Fox News clearly shows that its viewers are more misinformed than the viewers of other stations, and are this way for ideological reasons. But these are not necessarily the reasons that liberals may assume. Instead, the Fox “effect” probably occurs
both
because the station churns out falsehoods that conservatives readily accept—falsehoods that may even seem convincing to some liberals on occasion—but also because conservatives are overwhelmingly inclined to choose to watch Fox to begin with.

At the same time, it's important to note that they're also
disinclined
to watch anything else. Fox keeps constantly in their minds the idea that the rest of the media are “biased” against them, and conservatives duly respond by saying other media aren't worth watching—it's just a pack of lies. According to Public Policy Polling's annual TV News Trust Poll (the 2011 run), 72 percent of conservatives say they trust Fox News, but they also say they strongly distrust NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN. Liberals and moderates, in contrast, trust all of these outlets more than they distrust them (though they distrust Fox). This, too, suggests conservative selective exposure.

And there is an even more telling study of “Fox-only” behavior among conservatives, from Stanford's Shanto Iyengar and Kyu Hahn of Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. They conducted a classic left-right selective exposure study, giving members of different ideological groups the chance to choose stories from a news stream that provided them with a headline and a news source logo—Fox, CNN, NPR, and the BBC—but nothing else. The experiment was manipulated so that the same headline and story was randomly attributed to different news sources. The result was that Democrats and liberals were definitely less inclined to choose Fox than other sources, but spread their interest across the other outlets when it came to news. But Republicans and conservatives overwhelmingly chose Fox for hard news and even for soft news, and ignored other sources. “The probability that a Republican would select a CNN or NPR report was around 10%,” wrote the authors.

In other words—to reiterate a point made earlier—Fox News is both deceiver and enabler simultaneously. Its existence creates the
opportunity
for conservatives to exercise their biases, by selecting into the Fox information stream, and also by imbibing Fox-style arguments and claims that can then fuel biased reasoning about politics, science, and whatever else comes up.

It's also likely that conservatives, tending to be more closed-minded and more authoritarian, have a stronger emotional need for an outlet like Fox, where they can find affirmation and escape from the belief challenges constantly presented by the “liberal media.” Their psychological need for something affirmative is probably stronger than what's encountered on the opposite side of the aisle—as is their revulsion toward allegedly liberal (but really centrist) media outlets.

And thus we once again find, at the root of our political dysfunction, a classic nurture-nature mélange. The penchant for selective exposure is rooted in our psychology and our brains. Closed-mindedness and authoritarianism—running stronger in some of us than in others—likely are as well.

But nevertheless, and just as with consevative think tanks and counterexpertise, it took the development of a broad array of media choices before these tendencies could be fully activated. The seed needed fertile soil in which to grow. Cast it on stony ground—say, the more homogeneous media environment of the 1960s and 1970s, when
The New York Times
and
Washington Post
were the “papers of record” and everybody watched the three network channels and PBS—and its growth will be stunted.

Perhaps the fact that early studies of selective exposure sometimes failed, leading psychologists to largely discard the theory—even as now, it has been revived and is coming on strong—itself suggests the potency of this environmental change.

At this point in the book's narrative, I have laid out three different bodies of evidence that help to build a case about American conservatives' unique misalignment with reality—and how this misalignment has come to exist.

First, I've explored motivated reasoning, and how this emotional and automatic process leads many of us to do just about
anything
to defend our identities and beliefs—including clinging to wrong ideas and arguing fiercely on their behalf. And I've shown some evidence suggesting that this tendency may be more prevalent on the political right (although liberals are certainly not immune to it)—not just motivated reasoning in general, but selective exposure in particular.

Second, I've surveyed a large body of research on conservative psychology—finding that conservatives (especially authoritarians) appear to be less Open, less tolerant of uncertainty and ambiguity, less integratively complex, and to have a stronger need for closure.

Finally, I've shown how political, social, and technological change in the U.S.—factors like the mobilization of a conservative movement, the proliferation of supporting think tanks and “experts,” a leftward shift of academia in response, and the growth of sympathetic conservative media outlets—have added fuel to the fire. All of these new factors interact with conservative psychology, in such a way as to make the misinformation problem worse.

Now, then, it's time for a very different kind of evidence. It's time to look at
how factually wrong conservatives actually are
. I've shown many hints of this throughout the book, but now comes the time to look systematically.

This is a critically important part of the story. It would be one thing to theorize that conservatives are likely to be more dogmatic about incorrect beliefs in a context where there aren't many real world cases of conservatives being incorrect. People would very understandably wonder why anyone came up with such a theory in the first place.

But that's not where we find ourselves. The evidence, in this case, is the best support for the theory one could imagine.

Notes

147
“the most consistently misinformed”
Fox News Sunday, June 19, 2011. Transcript available online at
http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/fox-news-sunday/transcript/defense-secretary-robert-gates-exit-interview-jon-stewart-talks-politics-media-bias?page=6
.

147
rated it “false”
PolitiFact, “Jon Stewart says those who watch Fox News are the ‘most consistently misinformed media viewers,'” June 20, 2011. Available online at
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/jun/20/jon-stewart/jon-stewart-says-those-who-watch-fox-news-are-most/
.

147
tizzy at Fox News
For an overview of some of the fallout, see Media Matters, “Jon Stewart Gets It Right About Fox News,” June 22, 2011. Available online at
http://mediamatters.org/research/201106220022
.

148
my calls at that time
Chris Mooney, “When Facts Don't Matter: Proving the Problem With Fox News,”
DeSmogBlog
, June 29, 2011. Available online at
http://www.desmogblog.com/when-facts-don-t-matter-proving-problem-fox-news
.

149
widespread public misperceptions about the Iraq war
Project on International Policy Attitudes, “Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War,” October 2003. Available online at
http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/IraqMedia_Oct03/IraqMedia_Oct03_rpt.pdf
.

150
late 2010 survey
Jon A. Krosnick and Bo MacInnis, “Frequent Viewers of Fox News Are Less Likely to Accept Scientists' Views of Global Warming,” December 2010. Available online at
http://woods.stanford.edu/docs/surveys/Global-Warming-Fox-News.pdf
.

150
much more comprehensive study
Lauren Feldman et al, “Climate On Cable: The Nature and Impact of Global Warming Coverage on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC,”
International Journal of Press/Politics
, in press.