Given time and interest, an honest search for knowledge is preferable to reading a set number of ideologically-rooted viewpoints.

However, given a lifetime of experience, many people have political philosophies. Right or wrong ([1]), they aren’t wanting to be challenged on any meaningful level with most articles they read.

My take is that probably only something on the order of 1% of Americans are using substantial critical thinking when reading news.

I don’t want to sound like I’m just complaining, so I’ll offer this actionable hypothesis. We are expecting too much of people given their stretched attention spans and carnivorous media habits. When I say “expecting too much”, I’m saying that it is statistically impossible for more than a rarefied subset of people to engage in a meaningful way under such conditions.

If we want some sort of Athenian town hall discussions, we would have to change the rules and context of discussion. Allowing people to bounce around cyberspace, commenting with about as much thought as birds put into mid-flight pooping is just not going to give satisfactory results.

Notes:

1. Wrong! … I’d say a vast majority of people are wrong to think their underlying philosophies about politics or human psychology are good enough as is. They are “good enough” for a token level of understanding and tribal echo chamber discussion.

If I could be benevolent version of Rupert Murdoch for a day, and hoped to educate an audience, I would still struggle to find effective ways to succeed at engaging the audience for any meaningful kind of ‘educational’ content. Heck, as much as I like comedic style news stories (a la John Oliver) they aren’t really showing how to do critical thinking. They are still largely emotionally driven, non-scholarly looks at current events. While I happen to agree with many of Oliver’s calls to action, his rhetoric vastly overshadows his analysis.