The Importance of Processing Information

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In general your mainstream media are for the most part um pretty good and so i i think people should have confidence in that conservatives clearly don't. The Nixon campaign used to openly admitted they were playing the refs so to speak to try to get more favorable coverage, which is happening more on the left now. People who think foxes liberal will watch something on foxes and be like oh this is liberal this is really really liberal - it's we see what we expect to see.

The democratic ideal demands that the citizenry think critically about matters of public import. Yet many Democrats and Republicans in the United States have fallen short of that standard because political tribalism motivates them to acquire, perceive and evaluate political information in a biased manner. The result is an electorate that is more extreme, hostile and willing to reject unfavorable democratic outcomes.

Shermer and Redmond discuss: why we have political duopoly (Duverger’s law) • parties vs. policies • Are we living in a post-truth, fake-news, alternative facts world? • How do we know political polarization is worse now than in the past? • acquiring, perceiving, and evaluating political information • evaluating: false political information, political numbers and arguments, claims of rigged election • whataboutism • cognitive responsibilities of citizenship • cognitive biases • political polarization • myside bias • numeracy vs. innumeracy • solutions to the polarization problem.

Timothy J. Redmond received his PhD in political science from the University at Buffalo. He is an award-winning educator and author of over one hundred articles on critical thinking and politics. He is a professor at Daemen University where he teaches a political science and history course for education students.