Trusting Expertise
I think that American conservative trust in mass media is a sub-issue, underneath a broader one. Which is how much trust they put in institutions and expertise in general. Educational, governmental, scientific, etc. Being raised Young Earth Creationist and imbibing a constant diet of Rush Limbaugh & Co. I'm very familiar with the posture of skepticism towards institutions. But I've moved away from that posture because I’ve come to believe it's generally powered by three inaccurate epistemological presuppositions. First, is naïve realism: the idea that what we perceive is what is unquestionably real. How we interpret it must be how it is. One of the really cool things the scientific process (and institutions) has taught us is that our natural intuitions are very often shockingly wrong. (It’s very unintuitive that we are on an oblate spheroid spinning a thousand miles an hour.) When scientific institutions DO misfire, it's generally when the theories reinforce our...