False Facts and the Conservative Distortion Machine

The "godly Christian" crowd that makes up the core of the Republican Party's ever more putrid party base blather incessantly about "family values" and "biblical values" yet no one lies and distorts the truth more than these people and their allies in the far right media outlets.  Fox News is a prime example, but the pattern of lies, deceptions and deliberate distortions is sadly the norm and not the exception when it comes to the "conservative media."  It's a prime example of the hypocrisy that is a principal characteristic of today's self-styled conservatives, many of whom simple care nothing about the truth even as the congratulated themselves on their supposed piety and righteousness.  A piece in Salon looks at the pattern of the lies and distortions that aim to brainwash and deceive the cretin filled GOP base.  Here are excerpts:

Citizens are misinformed — often badly so. It’s not just that they lack good information — which would merely make them uninformed — they have plenty of bad information that leads them to believe untrue things. Or more likely the other way around: They believe untrue things, and that leads them to collect — even invent — bad information to flesh out what they already believe.

This was vividly illustrated by a 1991 study that 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 isn’t the exception, it’s the rule, and researchers have been grappling with that fact, and its implications, for some time now.

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.

“Political debate and policymaking are hard enough, but if people from opposing ideological camps come in with their own sets of facts, that makes it really tough to have a vibrant debate that leads to good public policy,” Reedy said. “That’s a big part of why we created the knowledge distortion index and have been studying these issues, is to try to help figure out how to combat the problem of ideological distortion of political knowledge.”

“we looked at the connection between people’s distorted factual beliefs and their views on the public policy issues related to those. We ran statistical tests to see the effects of the typical factors on someone’s opinion on a policy issue — things like their demographics and political values — and also the impact of knowledge distortion. We found that knowledge distortion did indeed have an independent effect on one’s policy preferences . . .

“Our strongest results, I think, are just confirming that this values-based political knowledge distortion is happening and it’s having an independent effect on one’s vote choice,” he concluded.
As the study itself said:

Whatever future refinements may be made to the values-based distortion model, the unsettling evidence remains that many voters are systematically misinformed on political issues, and those erroneous factual beliefs appear to influence how they mark their ballot on election day.

This is a disturbingly serious problem for a political system that purports to not only reflect the “will of the people,” but that also respects reality as a basic matter of course. “Facts are stubborn things,” John Adams observed — a true man of the Enlightenment. “Facts are stupid things,” Ronald Reagan famously misquoted him. It’s painfully obvious whose world we’re living in now. It’s a good deal less obvious how to escape. 

Go to the website of any "family values" organization, Townhall.com, or Wing Nut Daily and you will see a deliberate distortion of facts aimed at pushing the ignorant to vote to support the Christofascist/ Tea Party agenda.