My sister lives in northern New Jersey. As I may previously have mentioned, she was a lifelong Democrat until the last several years. She changed and became a conservative once she realized how frequently Barack Obama lied.
We, as a family, have a deep aversion to lies. By the same token, we have a deep commitment to telling the truth. This often gets us into trouble in that there are lots of times people do not want to hear the truth.
In any event, this has caused my sister untold grief. Because liberal friends and relatives surround her, she must nowadays hold her tongue. If she does not, she is either rejected out of hand or exposed to withering criticism.
Despite this, she recently asked some friends about their attitude toward Fox News. The response was scathing. She was told that the folks at Fox always lie. When she followed up by asking is they ever watch Fox News, the answer was: Never. Why would they? Fox lies.
None of this surprised me. I too have encountered this phenomenon. Rabid liberals constantly dismiss the station as unreliable. For them, the channel’s slogan of “fair and balanced” is a joke. It is spurious propaganda that they will not deign to dignify.
Nonetheless, the question must be asked about how they come to this conclusion. Since they do not watch Fox, it cannot be from personal experience. And indeed it is not. They believe in the outlet’s dishonesty because everyone they know believes in it. Hermetically sealed in a liberal bubble, the left wing’s conventional wisdom is all they hear.
The irony is that those on the left take pride in being intellectuals. They regard themselves as scientific, whereas their adversaries are dismissed as religious fanatics who know only what the Bible tells them. Clearly, they look at facts, while conservatives live in a fairy world.
One of the ways leftists assert their alleged superiority is by quoting the sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He once said that everyone is entitled their own opinion, whereas no one is entitled to their own facts. Since liberals have a monopoly on the facts, their opponents are obviously liars.
Except that we determine facts by observing reality. Liberals obviously do not do this with respect to Fox. Their knowledge is almost exclusively second-hand. Moreover, were they to peruse this despised outlet, they would discover that it often relates details the mainstream media leave out.
Were liberals as honest as they claim, they would realize that their favorite sources of information routinely lie by omission. Embarrassing specifics never make it into their stories. Furthermore, those that do are clothed in tendentious language. The very words used to describe objectionable foes imply that they are horrible people.
When I was a teenager, my liberal teachers taught me that liberalism was rational, unlike the ideas of those who opposed it. The alleged good guys produced all of the decent research and theorizing. At the time, this meant that John Maynard Keyes was a God.
Only decades later did I learn of the existence of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. These were left out of my education precisely because they might have been persuasive. It is the same with omitting Fox from the awareness of card-carrying progressives.
And so liberals are exposed to a truncated and prejudiced version of reality. Far from being scientific, it encourages selective perception. People on the left see what they want to see and no more. They do not even realize how narrow their vision is because they seldom look beyond it.
Hence, why don’t liberals realize that FBI agent Peter Strzok was guilty of gross discrimination? Because they focus on the sins of those who denounce him. Similarly, why don’t they credit president Trump with reviving the economy? Because he is a villain who does nothing right.
Liberals not only believe they are intellectuals; they are convinced that they are uniquely intelligent. They presumably see facts that conservatives don’t because they are mentally equipped to detect them. What they fail to take into account is that intelligence is not enough.
If we are to ascertain how the world operates we must keep our eyes open. We must be honest with ourselves and open to unwelcome data. Obviously the Fox haters do not heed this advice. It is therefore they who are burying themselves in an airtight box that does not have an exit.
Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University
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