Political Psychology

I remember one morning in a seminar class in my last semester of law school having a discussion with my classmates concerning the effect the internet would have on the dissemination of the news. People now have access to vast troves of information and I observed my classmates arguing through variations on what appeared to me to be a touchingly naive underlying consensus that this would result in a more informed populace, one capable of exercising critical judgement as to which resources were most trustworthy and which perspectives could claim the strongest arguments. I argued that in reality most people have neither the time nor the intelligence nor the inclination to play at their game of analytical objectivity--people would simply do what they have always done, only more so given the multiplied options and facility provided by the new medium: they will seek out those news outlets that confirm their prejudices most energetically and emphatically. Since I had thought about this question before, I was able to deliver a brief and fairly coherent and, most important, punctual perspective. That ended the discussion.  

How can one-sided articles like this one:
http://spectator.org/archives/2008/07/16/obamas-left-wing-extremism
be particularly interesting to intelligent people (which is always a minority of the population), even in the rare cases when they string together some good points? All of these editorials (and I do not even except those written by the few authors whom I regularly read), all of them--insult one's intelligence. Instead of confronting all the relevant facts on a given issue, as honor and honesty require, editorialists either misrepresent or ignore the inconvenient facts. For example, the Harvardeer below critiques the Obama health care plan using the usual arguments--but then fails to mention that there are a few problems with the status quo that the republicans are doing nothing to rectify: we spend vastly more than any other nation on our grossly inefficient health care system and we derive little obvious benefit from the huge amount of extra spending we do over and above that of other rich nations. He also fails to note that the government currently pays for 60% of health spending in this country, including tax breaks. Now, I am aware of these inconvenient facts and still oppose nationalization of the health system at this time. Why? Because I believe that we derive tremendous non-obvious benefits from our partly private system. Nationalizing the system would diminish innovation at all levels (which is a double blow because the entire world depends upon our innovation in this field), it would create new socialist-minded voting constituencies (perhaps nurses unions to add to the abominable the teacher's unions), it would further encourage the dependency psychology already too prevalent among certain social groups, it would strike a terrible blow to the ideal of individual liberty, it would make medical care the political plaything of unaccountable bureaucrats and cynical politicians, and, contrary to Democratic propaganda, it might very well intensify the gap between rich and poor--the rich will always have access to private care, which might someday be much better than the public system.

And that's only my criticism of an editorial I fundamentally agree with!