“Lead researcher Gordon Hodson told LiveScience that the results of the study indicate a vicious cycle, in which people with low intelligence are drawn to socially conservative ideologies. In turn, those ideologies can contribute to prejudices.

“Socially conservative ideologies tend to offer structure and order,” he said, explaining why those with lower intelligence may gravitate toward the right. “Unfortunately, many of these features can contribute to prejudice.”

The researchers found that people with lower intelligence also tended to have less contact with other races and groups, which, Dr. Hodson said, supports previous research that determined interacting with other groups is mentally challenging and cognitively draining.“*

My book Fight the Right – which is coming out in the Fall from Random House – is chockful of useful (and irrefutable) information-bits like this.

If I do it, er, right, I will be making tiny conservative heads go pop all over North America!

* H/T

Me? I don’t like any of it. It stinks. It makes the Sun folks, many of whom I know and like, look bad.

Now, as I pointed out to another Sun chum, there is an essential falsity at the centre of everything that TV news does: asking you to pretend to type at your desk while they film you, asking you to pretend to be walking down a hallway to your office, asking you to re-create some event or statement, because the cameraperson arrived too late to capture it. Others have written about this, more compellingly than I ever could.

There was no excuse for this mistake. News should be about truth; it shouldn’t be about fakery.

And, so, the next time one of the Sun’s many newsroom critics is hovering above a quote, looking to pretty it up – or clipping a bit of tape in a way that they know will create an entirely different meaning than what was intended – that should remember that axiom, too.

Dumber.

Brings to mind that old adage of, er, me: the only people who still believe that people look to the media for ethical inspiration are the media.

Romney on CNN: “I’m not concerned about the very poor … We will hear from the Democrat Party the plight of the poor”

Watch this.