Fact Checking

The folks that support Trump and Carson largely get their news from Fox News– the network that uses the trademark “fair and balanced” to hawk lies and fear. Fox News has been shown to be a major agent of disinformation. Politfact explains that they lie about 60 percent of the time. Only 10 percent of the Fox News claims they rated were true. This is why their viewers score so badly on tests of their knowledge with one study suggesting that people who watched no news of any kind scored higher on aptitude of current events than Fox News viewers.



But that’s not all of it. Fox News viewers don’t only suffer from a network that lies; they are also victims of the increasing politicization of truth. It is no longer the case that we have commonly accepted truths from which we derive our political beliefs. Now every truth is itself ideological. Truths are not drawn from evidence and fact; they are culled from deep belief systems. And while this happens across the political spectrum, it is especially true for members of the GOP.



As Mooney explains in his study of the Republican brain, we now have increasing examples of conservatives denying commonly held truths like relativity. Science is seen in some conservative quarters as fundamentally ideological, a thing that one does or does not believe in. Mooney points out that conservatives’ “willingness to deny what’s true may seem especially outrageous when it infects scientific topics like evolution or climate change. But the same thing happens with economics, with American history, and with any other factual matter where there’s something ideological—in other words, something emotional and personal—at stake.”

It is as though those that live in the land of truthiness occupy a parallel universe where facts matter not at all. As Mooney puts it, “today’s conservatives have their own ‘truth,’ their own experts to spout it, and their own communication channels—newspapers, cable networks, talk radio shows, blogs, encyclopedias, think tanks, even universities—to broad- and narrowcast it.”



But it’s even worse. Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler conducted one of the most revealing — and depressing — studies of truth and politics. They showed that when conservatives hold a false belief and are shown irrefutable evidence to the contrary, rather than change their mind, they actually cling more tenaciously to their misinformed belief. They found that Republicans held more firmly to their false beliefs about the Iraq War when exposed to correcting information. They practiced “motivated reasoning” and were skeptical of any information that contradicted their ideas. They simply wouldn’t listen to any source of information from outside their bubble.



This is why Carson’s campaign could actually profit from being caught in a lie. When Politico caught Carson lying about receiving a scholarship to West Point, proving he had, in fact, never applied, Carson’s camp used Politico’s story to claim that Carson was being smeared by the “liberal media.”