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Friday 4 May 2012
Conservatives, Seeking To Show They Are Open-Minded, Ignore Contrary Evidence (And No, This Is Not an Onion Article)

It’s one thing to show that Republicans know more basic facts, like which party wants to drill in ANWR, or wants to shrink the size of government. This is simply showing that they are more informed. But that’s very different from examining which party believes more political misinformation—e.g., believing that global warming isn’t real, or that President Obama is a Muslim from Kenya.

Believing right wing political misinformation often correlates with being more informed in general and, indeed, with watching Fox News. So without making the basic distinction between being informed, and being misinformed, Munro’s argument fails. These are two very different things.

And anyway, as Munro himself notes, the likely reason for the Democrats’ lower informational score in the Pew study is the party’s “bipolar political coalition, which combines well-credentialed post-graduate progressives who score well in quizzes with a much larger number of poorly educated supporters, who score badly.”

Most important, Munro nowhere discusses all the data on Republicans’ false factual beliefs—their staggering embrace of politicized misinformation, on issues ranging from climate change to the President’s place of birth. In an article on Republican open-mindedness, Munro ignores the counter-evidence!

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