As a watcher of all things media, I am always impressed when a PR person makes a huge story out of nothing. A good example is the recent press about research showing how liberals and conservatives have different brains.
http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/237131/ [no longer available]
This ground-breaking study shows that the brain is somehow involved in decision-making. At the risk of sounding braggy, I already knew that. I’d be willing to bet – and here I am going out on a limb – that on average, people who love to play bingo have different brains than people who design computer chips. And cowards have different brains from extreme sports lovers, and so on. How much researching does it take to discover “duh”?
But “duh” is not how the story got spun all over the media. During this time of presidential elections, the story turned into “Scientists prove conservatives are simple-minded.”
I’m guessing this is how the process went down: The scientists (usually liberals) report their findings to their university bosses (usually liberals) who call their public relations people (usually liberals) to sex up this story and feed it to the media (usually liberals). There wasn’t much to slow it down.
Still, you have to give props to the PR person who put the lipstick on this turd. Someone earned his or her money this week. Nice work.
We live in a strange time in human history. Every time a scientist discovers that child molesters or geniuses or musicians have different brain structures, the public gasps at the suggestion that the brain is involved in thinking. What were the other hypotheses? Souls? Elbows?
Thanks to the persistent superstition of free will, it still qualifies as big news that the brain is a moist machine. And by that I mean it is big news to conservatives. Liberals saw it coming.
Update:
I haven’t done this in a while, but I had to promote the following comment from DuggleBogey to the end of this post:
“Is this not just saying that “all conservatives are not idiots, but all idiots are conservatives?”