Neuroscience (nonsense) of Cable News

I am proud of this tautology - I stopped watching television. More confirmation bias for not only the cognitive dissonance of watching the Cable News but also it's potential for inducing more creativity into the inferred justification.

"Ken Auletta recently reported in the New Yorker, cable news has grown increasingly partisan in recent years, seeking out an ever more balkanized audience. He cites a study of 35,000 viewers conducted by TiVo: for each Democrat who watches Fox News there are eighteen Republicans, and for every Republican who watches MSNBC there are six Democrats. It turns out that everybody wants their own set of facts.

This is an old phenomenon that's been exaggerated by new media trends. Partisan voters are convinced that they're rational⎯only the other side is irrational⎯but we're actuallyrationalizers. The Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels analyzed survey data from the 1990's to prove this point. During the first term of Bill Clinton's presidency, the budget deficit declined by more than 90 percent. However, when Republican voters were asked in 1996 what happened to the deficit under Clinton, more than 55 percent said that it had increased. What's interesting about this data is that so-called "high-information" voters⎯these are the Republicans who read the newspaper, watch cable news and can identify their representatives in Congress⎯weren't better informed than "low-information" voters. According to Bartels, the reason knowing more about politics doesn't erase partisan bias is that voters tend to only assimilate those facts that confirm what they already believe. If a piece of information doesn't follow Republican talking points⎯and Clinton's deficit reduction didn't fit the "tax and spend liberal" stereotype⎯then the information is conveniently ignored. "Voters think that they're thinking," Achen and Bartels write, "but what they're really doing is inventing facts or ignoring facts so that they can rationalize decisions they've already made."

The bleak lesson is that we turn the spotlight of attention into an information-filter, a way to block-out disagreeable points of view. Consider this experiment, which was done in the late 1960's, by the cognitive psychologists Timothy Brock and Joe Balloun. I describe the study in my book:

Brock and Balloun played a group of people a tape-recorded message attacking Christianity. Half of the subjects were regular churchgoers while the other half were committed atheists. To make the experiment more interesting, Brock and Balloun added an annoying amount of static⎯a crackle of white noise⎯to the recording. However, they allowed listeners to reduce the static by pressing a button, so that the message suddenly became easier to understand. Their results were utterly predicable and rather depressing: the non-believers always tried to remove the static, while the religious subjects actually preferred the message that was harder to hear. Later experiments by Brock and Balloun demonstrated a similar effect with smokers listening to a speech on the link between smoking and cancer. We silence the cognitive dissonance through self-imposed ignorance.

Cable news takes advantage of this cognitive weakness. "

I have read good number studies on the dissonance of the viewers (irrespective of the political ideology) but yet to see a single study on the TV hosts. I think the hosts don't have any sought of cognitive dissonance. There needs to be some cognition to have cognitive dissonance. These are people soaked and pickled in dissonance for such a long time, they need serious medical help for delirium. Sadly, the obnoxiously hefty pay-scale doesn't help much either. Unlike politicians they don't have to get re-elected but viewers can always throw them off the air anytime. But the symbiosis of delirious hosts hooking to the cognitive weakness of the viewers has been so embedded, it even makes the evolution of human consciousness look like a piece of cake. Knowledge of neuroscience has to become ubiquitous for this symbiosis to end and we all know that ain't happening any time soon. Until then we have to vote with that big red power button on the remote.