New Documentary: "The Poisoning of the American Mind"
New Documentary: "The Poisoning of the American Mind"
Right-wing and left-wing ideological silos are damaging America
Documentary
NEW DOCUMENTARY: THE POISONING OF THE AMERICAN MIND
Right-wing and left-wing ideological silos are damaging America
From the Connors Institute at Shippensburg University
Editors’ note: A new book on the ways that right-wing and left-wing information (misinformation, disinformation) silos are deranging our politics, titled The Poisoning of the American Mind, will be published by George Mason University Press in June of this year. It is edited / authored by Lawrence M. Eppard (Shippensburg University /
), (co-founder of Free Black Thought), and (Rutgers University). A documentary film of the same title from the Connors Institute explores its themes.Watch it here:
Read an excerpt from the book here.
In a nutshell, the book and documentary argue that human beings are hard-wired to look for information that we agree with (regardless of the information’s veracity), to avoid information that makes us uncomfortable (even if that information is true), and to interpret information in a manner that is most favorable to our sense of self.
We all have these tendencies—Republican or Democrat, young or old, rich or poor, black or white, male or female, it doesn’t matter.
The damage these cognitive tendencies can cause to one’s perception of reality depends in part upon the information ecosystem that one inhabits. Unfortunately, in the U.S. today, most liberals and conservatives alike have sequestered themselves in sealed information ecosystems where people and sources they believe to be trustworthy and authoritative regularly bombard them with misleading information and even outright lies.
While there are several factors one could plausibly blame for this predicament, the decline in the quality of the sources of information that the right and left rely on over the last few decades plays a primary role. These sources include academia and the mainstream media for the left and outlets like Fox for the right. As a result of this decline in the quality of information coming from trusted sources, we are faced with an epistemic crisis that is poisoning the American mind and threatening our democracy.
The film, based on the forthcoming book The Poisoning of the American Mind (George Mason University Press), was written and produced by Allyson Ritchey and Lawrence M. Eppard and presented by the Connors Institute at Shippensburg University.
So I think that while I appreciate this, I think we should acknowledge the way this was presented was biased. To make it more balanced It should have started with Trumps election in 2016. Then the absolute firehouse of lies that followed from Russia Collusion to Covid, to the Election law changes that resulted and to Hunter Biden's laptop. That's what infected people's minds. It's cognitive dissonence. It's what led to what occurred on jan 6th and withholding all that information paints an absolutely different potrait. I think you should also talk about why Fox came about, it was to balance out all the other stations that were left leaning. How do I know? I worked at all of them.
Kind of OK, but better to have started with COVID issue. Starting with January 6th runs into Supreme Court deliberations and the attempts to "get Trump." I can understand obsessive opinions in all mainstream media on both sides. The unraveling of the Covid mis, dis and mal-information would be more interesting. I
wonder about the "turn off cable news" n
remark. Is that an attempt to filter out what we often not see reported on 'reliable" sources.