Why We Need Sean Hannity

“But the public doesn’t care about this stuff, right? So how do you get Joe America to talk about it in his living room? You give him a little hit of testosterone. Getting to the next step required substituting emotional response for intellectual response. Reality TV, chat boards, talk radio…there were dozens of new vehicles to reinforce confirmation bias. Once an individual was addicted to the hate buzz of stating his opinion, arguing about it, and thereby reinforcing what he already believed, he was primed to respond that way to other issues. Think tanks started building interlaced latticeworks of issues. How can you take an issue like climate change, where 99% of peer-reviewed research supports it, and polarize it? You link it to other social identities. We now have clusters of identities that travel together: religious, conservative, global warming skeptic, Chick-fil-a eater. It’s increasingly difficult to disassociate from one without disassociating from all. Sean Hannity and others like him exist because we need him: we need the constant reinforcement to keep these identities together. We get an ego boast and hormonal jolt; the think tanks get foot soldiers.”

via sorrykids comments on Why is it permissible for public voices to be this way now? What can we really do about it?.


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