Yet again, David Brooks has a great column in today's New York Times. Today it's about how people filter information--in particular, how partisan affiliation shapes one's view of the world. As has been noted many times by the Dakota Alliance of blogs, Dave Kranz, the main Argus Leader political reporter, is a strong Democrat with a particular affection for George McGovern. And the editor of the Argus who makes decisions about what articles appear in the paper, Patrick Lalley, was extremely anti-Reagan and wrote bitterly about the "evil Republicans" in the past. All this is instructive. The leanings shape their view of the world. Note, for example, some of Brooks' evidence:
Party affiliation even shapes people's perceptions of reality. In 1960, Angus Campbell and others published a classic text, "The American Voter," in which they argued that partisanship serves as a filter. A partisan filters out facts that are inconsistent with the party's approved worldview and exaggerates facts that confirm it.That observation has been criticized by some political scientists, who see voters as reasonably rational. But many political scientists are coming back to Campbell's conclusion: people's perceptions are blatantly biased by partisanship.
For example, the Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels has pointed to survey data collected after the Reagan and Clinton presidencies. In 1988, voters were asked if they thought the nation's inflation rate had fallen during the Reagan presidency.
In fact, it did. The inflation rate fell from 13.5 percent to 4.1 percent. But only 8 percent of strong Democrats said the rate had fallen. Fifty percent of partisan Democrats believed that inflation had risen under Reagan. Strong Republicans had a much sunnier and more accurate impression of economic trends. Forty-seven percent said inflation had declined.
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