Social Media Meets the Flat Earth Society

For the better part of two decades, Democrats, journalists, and progressive academics have marshaled data seeming to show that consumption of conservative media (for much of that time, this mostly meant Fox News) was likely to harbor warped views of the world.

To wit: In 2004, a University of Maryland study reported that regular viewers of Fox News Channel and its affiliates had basic misconceptions about the U.S. war in Iraq. Two-thirds of them believed Saddam Hussein was working closely with al-Qaeda, for instance, while 33% of the regular Fox audience believed the U.S. military had located Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. These were significantly higher percentages than those who got their news from CNN, PBS, or the three major networks.

Another study, six years later by two Stanford University researchers, showed significantly less confidence among Fox News viewers in the reliability of the scientific establishment. The topic was global warming, not COVID-19 – remember, this was 2010 – but with the benefit of hindsight, skepticism toward scientific “consensus” looks better than blindly following the crowd.

And so it went.

In 2020, scholars from Yale and the University of California, Berkeley paid Fox News viewers $15 an hour to watch CNN for seven hours a week instead. After a month, the CNN converts were 6 percentage points more aligned with the government on COVID policy and 7 points more likely to support voting by mail.

This modification was portrayed in the legacy media as increased enlightenment once these viewers were lured away from the gravitational pull of Fox News. That’s certainly one way to look at it. Considering that mail-in voting is a Democratic Party hobby horse, it could just as easily be argued that CNN, not Fox News, was the outlet engaged in political proselytizing.

As recently as 2022, liberals cited a Yahoo News/YouGov poll to portray Trump voters as racist. The survey in question showed that six in 10 Trump voters agree with the statement that “a group of people in this country are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants and people of color who share their political views.”

This belief was characterized in Yahoo’s own news coverage of the study as a core tenet of the “false conspiracy theory” known as “the great replacement.” But “false conspiracy theory” might seem overly pejorative these days, as congressional Democrats only recently ended their insistence on a lengthy government shutdown to stop aggressive Trump administration deportation and border enforcement policies.

The larger point here is that consuming a steady diet of one-sided political commentary has an impact on those sucking at the partisan firehose. And it shouldn’t be a shock to learn from a new poll that this phenomenon goes both ways – or that social media has made the problem ever-so-much worse. This time, it’s not Republicans under the microscope. It’s Democrats, and lots of them.

A YouGov poll released Monday showed that 42% of Democrats say the 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life in Butler, Penn.– where rifle fire that claimed the life of a firefighter and missed Trump’s temple by inches – was faked. (This compares to 7% of Republicans.) In addition, one-fourth of Democrats said that the attempted assassination at Trump’s Florida golf course was staged, notwithstanding a criminal trial in open court resulting in a life sentence for the perpetrator.

Finally, when it came to the recent attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner – by a heavily armed defendant who was apprehended in front of hundreds of journalists – some 34% of Democrats don’t believe it really happened. In other words, eyewitness testimony has its hands full with left-wing social media actors.

“In total, 21% of Democrats responded that they thought all three events were staged, as did 11% of Independents and 3% of Republicans,” noted the poll’s sponsor. A conservative wag might be within his rights to say that this shows that Democrats are seven times stupider than Republicans.

I wouldn’t go that far myself. Some of my best friends are Democrats…But in all seriousness, to a nonpartisan mind, this latest poll suggests that progressives have some soul-searching to do. But nonpartisan thinking is hard to come by these days. The Washington Post story on this survey included a tortured explanation from an academic who pointed the finger at – who else? – Trump himself. Here’s the relevant passage:

Joan Donovan, a Boston University professor who researches media manipulation, said the results are an indicator of the role of showmanship in Trump’s presidency. “It just seems incredibly Hollywood to imagine that this is staged,” Donovan said of the correspondents’ dinner shooting. “The entire apparatus of the government has been turned into a reality TV show.”

So yes, by all means: Let’s blame the victim. Literally. Perhaps that’s why Republicans are half as likely as Democrats to express faith in America’s elite institutions of higher education.