"In a related study, Northwestern University researcher Monica Prasad and her colleagues found similar behavior
among partisan Republican voters in Illinois and North Carolina.
Presented with evidence suggesting that there was no link between Saddam
Hussein and the 9/11 attacks, these voters tended to counterargue and
to double-down on their beliefs, rather than change their minds or admit
error."
That is --- when they realized they had embraced a lie, rather than admit it and accept the truth, they DOUBLE-DOWN on the lie.
Researchers identified three obvious lies about Bush's war in Iraq and presented them to their subjects. As we might expect, the Fox viewers were more likely to believe the lies.
"Sure enough, Fox viewers led the way in embracing these false assertions, with 80 percent of them believing at least one of the three. Seventy-one percent of CBS viewers also held one of these three false beliefs. For consumers of NPR and PBS, only 23 percent believed one or more of these pro-war myths. Notably, Republicans and supporters of George W. Bush had a much higher level of belief in these falsehoods. So what caused these misperceptions to exist? Republican ideological allegiance likely led to an initial belief in these misrepresentations, but then Fox watching bolstered these views. "
From "How the Iraq War Launched the Modern Era of Political BS" by Chris Moonie in Mother Jones Magazine; http://tinyurl.com/yapyv9kv
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/06/iraq-war-wmds-saddam-political-unreason
"Fox viewers led the way in embracing these false assertions, with 80
percent of them believing at least one of the three. For consumers of
both NPR and PBS, in contrast, only 23 percent believed one or more of
these pro-war myths."
