Kerby Anderson

Columnist Barton Swaim wrote about “The Left’s Vast Lack of Knowledge.” He focused on it because of the bungled attempts by liberal journalists to describe Charlie Kirk and his impact.

He pointed to articles that pieced together random quotations attributed to Charlie Kirk without any context. One of the quotes attributed to him made him “sound like a Jew-hater of the 1930s.” He was, in fact, quoting a social media post that he critiqued. But the liberal journalists responsible for the quotes didn’t even stop to think that Charlie Kirk had always been a staunch defender of Israel and the Jewish people.

Barton Swaim used to assume “that liberals and progressives knew more about their conservative opposites than vice versa.” But he says more than one reader pointed to Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind. Perhaps one of the people who wrote to him heard my radio commentaries six years ago on the subject.

At the time, I had a co-host who argued that both sides of the political spectrum make wrong assumptions about the other. While that is true, conservatives usually know more about liberals than liberals know about conservatives. Jonathan Haidt is probably best known for his books, The Coddling of the American Mind and The Anxious Generation.

His book The Righteous Mind documented a detailed study of predictions liberals and conservatives made about each other. Moderates and conservatives made the most accurate predictions. Liberals made the least accurate. And I might mention, there are other studies, such as the research by Arthur Brooks. He found a significant perception gap when studying Democrats and Republicans.

All these studies illustrate why it is important for us to use discernment when consuming media.