The Fourteenth Blackbird: How Liberals Search For The Truth

A recent Pew Report revealed that conservatives are more interested in gorging themselves on right-wing propaganda while liberals are more interested in getting the facts right. Pew Research "gave respondents a list of 36 popular media sources and asked how much they trusted each one." Here is what it found (via Salon):

Out of the 36 news sources, consistent liberals trusted 28, a mix of liberal and mainstream news sources. Mostly, liberal respondents generally agreed, holding out a little more skepticism for overtly ideological sources like Daily Kos or ThinkProgress, but not actually distrusting them, either. The only news sources liberals didn’t trust, generally, are overtly right-wing ones, such as Fox News, the Blaze, Breitbart, or Rush Limbaugh’s show.

Conservatives, on the other hand, saw betrayers and liars around every corner. Consistent conservatives distrusted a whopping 24 out of 36 outlets and mostly conservative respondents distrusted 15 and were skeptical of quite a few more. The hostility wasn’t just to well-known liberal sources like MSNBC. Strong conservatives hated all the network news, CNN, NPR, and the major national outlets, except the Wall Street Journal.

This explains to me why conservative talk radio is successful and liberal talk radio is not. I've tried listening to progressive talk radio and it just didn't turn my crank all that much even though I consider myself a liberal. It all just sounded too propagandistic for my tastes.

Like lots of other progressives, I prefer getting my information from a variety of sources, even -- on occasion -- Fox News and some conservative websites.  I still cannot stomach Rush Limbaugh and only listen to his program when things are going very badly for Republicans. Rush is the most hilarious thing going when bad things are happening to the GOP.

But in any event, when it comes to finding the truth of a matter, I think William Faulkner said it best:

"[There are] thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird -- but the truth, I would like to think, comes out, that when the reader has read all these thirteen different ways of looking at the blackbird, the reader has his own fourteenth image of that blackbird, which I would like to think is the true one."

I believe extreme polarization exists in the U.S. because a lot of conservatives are intellectually lazy in that they refuse to look at important issues from many different angles before formulating an opinion. I find such laziness to be incredibly unpatriotic and extremely dangerous.