Tuesday, November 22, 2011

The dumbing of America

Another study has confirmed it: watching Fox news makes you dumber. People who watch Fox are less informed about world events than people who don't watch any news at all.

Watching Fox News makes you dumber

I really hate sounding so partisan, so let me point out nobody says this about The National Review or The Wall Street Journal. Those are partisan, right-wing hack jobs, but they're not actively making their readers dumber.

This isn't just a statistical study. I got an email today from someone who puts "Dr." in front of their name, and yet has not managed to get a single fact right in any of our correspondence. It is not that this person is naturally stupid; it is that the requirements of adhering to their chosen orthodoxy forces them to deny self-evident facts to the point that they lose their way.

In an important sense, the history of the human race is the story of people choosing make-believe over reality. Let us hope that is not its epitaph.

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