The Name Of This Post Is (Yea) "Brain Dead"

We can talk all we want about the power of the blogosphere and the talk shows. But the fact is that most people’s view of facts—and their interpretation thereof—is shaped largely by the MSM. For young people, the ground has also been lovingly properly prepared and fertilized by an educational system increasingly dominated by liberal and even Leftist thought.

Add to this the propensity of most people to either be so heavily involved with their own lives that they have little time to dig beyond the headlines and the TV ads, and those who just have little interest and inclination to do so, and you have a recipe for a populace more and more susceptible to media manipulation.

And then notice that the MSM itself has become bolder and bolder in its “shaping” of the truth, its ignoring of stories that would reflect badly on its chosen candidates, its pumping up of every possible controversy about the opposition, and its misrepresentation of the views of said opposition, and you have a media that is responsible for even more than the ordinary 15-point candidate advantage of which Evan Thomas spoke.

There are also grass-roots efforts not clearly aligned with the press that can further the dissemination of lies favoring one candidate or another. I refer primarily to email campaigns spreading like wildfire from person to person. Early in this campaign there was an effort by McCain supporters to make it seem as though Obama is a Muslim. He is not (despite relatives who are), but the MSM used its power to help defeat that particular smear campaign by taking up the gauntlet to aggressively counter them. With the nomination of Sarah Palin, however, the email campaign against her has been tremendously successful, and the MSM has abdicated its duty to inform by doing virtually noting to contradict the “facts” therein.

I see and hear the evidence over and over in my friends. They repeat the talking points that they’ve been told: Palin is a creationist, she will campaign to end abortion, she made women pay for their rape kits, she thinks the Iraqi War is a holy endeavor blessed by the deity. Any attempt to tell them otherwise falls almost entirely (there are one or two exceptions) on deaf ears.

Sometimes they are explicit about not wanting facts—I’ve been told they are not interested in hearing what I might have to say even before I begin to speak. Another not atypical example is that of a friend who recently told me she really wasn’t interested in facts; what she does is to look at the example of how people live their lives, and Democrats clearly are better people who live better lives than Republicans.

This is about more than this election, although the election is certainly a big part of it. It’s about the way people think, and how they evaluate issues and people. If critical thinking has gone out the window, this country is in deep and perhaps even permanent trouble.

— Neo-Neocon, on confronting the cultish thinking surrounding the Barack Obama campaign, on her blog Neo-Neocon