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my gut based on the examples shown is that the person who did the study approached it with his own biases.
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well yes. it's a study. if it were some absolute Truth, there wouldn't be much point in discussion, would there? i mean, what would be talk about?
yes this is self-evidently correct yes it is.
personally, i think the data is more interesting than the interpretations offered of it--which is frequently the case.
so i floated an alternate riff that i thought erased some of the interpretive problems above. but it substituted different ones.
back in the day before it ate itself, the conservative media apparatus was pretty easy to delimit. things got trickier in the dismal period after 9/11/2001 for a while because the ways of framing issues and relations to them particular to that apparatus migrated into the mainstream press, which for all it's problems at least hadn't up to that time adopted the language of the contemporary right.
what seems in retrospect to have snapped this was the judith miller business at the ny times, which put the paper's institutional credibility in jeopardy and it was on that basis that the times began to back away from the simple repetition of administration infotainment and the language it was couched in both at the levels of stuff quoted and "analysis"---this ebbing away of conservative discourse from this point accelerated through the second bush term. if you wanted to, you could document the process.
the point is that it's much easier to talk about political language that shapes a given socio-cultural space than it is to talk about a collection of individuals who operate within that space---the language gives you something to talk about, it's sources enable you to define a space or region.
so i don't particularly think that as human beings conservative folk are more or less rigid than anyone else, really--i suppose there's a segment that is, just as there's a segment of any other population---but the degree to which a political language, once internalized, creates regularities, and that these regularities include particular types of rigidity of thinking---that we can talk about.
the problem really is not letting yourself slide off this way of framing things.
it's easy to do it if you're motivated to in any event, if you don't like the argument or information. once you slide off, it becomes a matter of political groups who don't like each other's politics calling each other names.
there are maybe problems of method in the study as well--but to get there you'd have to read it.