Poll: Half of Left Prefers Being Told What to Think

Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier

Of the now 80 or so of these entries I’ve written since May, all but two or three contained the above byline, “Analysis by…” yours truly. This was a conscious decision made before the website went live – based partly on the idea that I’d find more time to do some actual news coverage and that straight news coverage should be kept separate for editorializing and analysis, the way newspapers do. I’ve always been very uncomfortable with the approach the major news networks take, blending coverage of facts with spin and interpretation, as if we’re all too damn dumb to understand the significance of what the talking head is telling us.

For decades now, Americans have been knowingly consuming biased news coverage. At first, we all knew the media had a leftist bent and simply accounted for it when consuming their coverage. Then, much as the Alt-Right movement is an extreme and silly over-reaction to the Social Justice movement, we got Fox News as an extreme and silly over-reaction the left lean of CNN and the mainstream broadcast media as a whole. After that, instead of simply knowing that all media had a leftward slant to it, Americans could simply decide to tune in to whichever broadcast most often confirmed their prejudices rather than challenge them. Thus began a long slide toward the absurd degree of intellectual sloth that we have today. And, the coverage of the 2016 election turned into something of a new low-water-mark for the media as a whole. Facts were given short shrift for hysterics and pronouncements of doom and the like.

The deleterious effects on the brain of decades of this sort of news coverage among the uncritical, is in evidence all over social media. I like to visit, and admittedly troll, some extreme left Facebook groups just to keep an eye on what’s got them all riled up at any given moment. I do the same with alt-Right groups. The rank and file membership of Facebook’s lefty groups, are of course, still apoplectic over Hillary’s defeat. They fill their pages with fake news story after fake news story of voter fraud and intimidation. They keep droning on about the popular vote count and keep expressing hope the Electoral College will start Civil War II on December 19. There is, in fact, an almost eerie sameness to the stuff they all post and comment on.

A recent Pew Research poll highlights why. Pew asked if people would prefer more “just the facts” news coverage, sans “interpretation,” or if they’d like to carry on being told what to think. Staggeringly, to my jaded and jaundiced ass, most Americans – 59 percent, still most – would prefer just facts in their news coverage and for the opinions to be left out. Every now and again, you guys all do something that restores a glimmer of hope in humanity for me, thank you.

Here, however, is where it gets interesting – Pew noted not just people’s preference for news or editorialized news, but also their political affiliations. I can see why those partisan news networks are so popular now, having one’s prejudices confirmed feels nice. Only this time, it’s not some airhead just spouting a view similar to mine based on a loose interpretation of cherry-picked facts; it’s sitting right there in the raw data.

“Voters who supported Trump, now the president-elect, favored a “just the facts” approach by 71 percent to 29 percent. Clinton supporters were evenly split on the issue,” Ian Simpson of Reuters wrote in their story on the poll results.

Let that sink in.

Republicans, and people who supported Trump over Hillary, would prefer just information from the media, not spin, by almost three-to-one. Half of democrats and those otherwise inclined to vote for Hillary need to be told what to think about any given issue. This accounts for the sameness, the apparent groupthink that leads to any one rank-and-file “liberal” sounding just like any other one you bump in to. Thinking is hard. Making sense of the world is hard. It is no surprise that people disinclined to be responsible for earning their own living aren’t too keen on being responsible for making sure they understand the world around them in any meaningful sense.

Of course, it’s more than that. To possess the worldview of the average leftist requires a constant deluge of “confirmation” to drown out the screaming cognitive dissonance inside their skulls. That they’re seemingly conscious of this need on some level – one possible interpretation of Pew’s findings – is rather telling. Some among them know they’re addicted to junk it seems, but are unwilling to get help, just like a functional opioid addict.

Of course, that leaves the other half of lefties, the half that wants “just the facts.” Those folks offer a bit of hope for the future. Facts alone annihilate all lefty ideas and positions. Presented with just facts, perhaps those assorted liberals would wake up, bust out the window and escape the asylum. Oh, wait, that still hinges upon there being a place in the world where one can get “just the facts,” and it remains to be seen if the mainstream media will pay any attention at all to Pew’s findings.

As with most things, I’m not real optimistic about that happening anytime soon. Or ever.