Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
According to research completed by sociologists at the University of North Carolina and Northwestern University, even when politically misleading comments are made by public officials — like U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley‘s infamous “pulling the plug on grandma” myth — some people choose to believe the mistruths despite compelling information pointing to the contrary.
The study focused on 49 individuals who believed that Saddam Hussein was in part to blame for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Even when presented with evidence that proved their belief to be false, and even when that evidence came directly from conservative sources like President George W. Bush, all but one created justifications for continuing the belief.
Researchers concluded that people form beliefs, and then seek out information which upholds those beliefs and disregard information to the contrary.
“I do think there’s something to be said about people like Sarah Palin, and even more so Chuck Grassley, supporting this idea of death panels in a national forum,” Steve Hoffman, one of the study’s authors, told reporter Emily Badger of Miller-McCune. “That kind of puts the idea out there, but what people then do with the idea… Our argument is that people aren’t just empty vessels. You don’t just sort of open up their brains and dump false information in and they regurgitate it. They’re actually active processing cognitive agents.”
That view is more nuanced than the one held by many health care reform proponents — that citizens are only ill-informed because Rush Limbaugh makes them so…
“I think we’d all like to believe that when people come across disconfirming evidence, what they tend to do is to update their opinions,” said Andrew Perrin, an associate professor at UNC and another author of the study.
That some people might not do that even in the face of accurate information, the authors suggest in their article, presents “a serious challenge to democratic theory and practice.”
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