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Given Truth, the Misinformed Believe Lies More
SharpFang writes "In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that misinformed people, particularly political partisans, rarely changed their minds when exposed to corrected facts in news stories. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger."
There's something called the Kruger-Dunning effect which is kinda interesting as well Dunning-Kruger effect. The premise is the following one:
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes.
oblig xkcd http://www.xkcd.com/765/
rewriting history since 2109
He could have had his birth certificate lost or destroyed (fires do happen, things get lost in traveling, etc).
If he doesn't actually have a birth certificate, he can't show it, can he? The best he can do is go back to the hospital and ask for a replacement. However, as Hawaii and other states don't give out copies of Birth Certificates, the best he can do is have a Certificate of Live Birth.
Further, as others have repeatedly pointed out, there is the birth announcement in the Hawaiian newspaper. It's a bit hard to claim that 40-some-odd years ago, someone placed a fake birth announcement in a newspaper so some black guy could be elected President.
As to the proof of his birth, which Birthers repeatedly deny isn't valid despite it being used by several states (and which goes back to the heart of this story):
Snopes
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The era of objective journalism was a lot shorter than most people tend to think. The very idea that journalism was different from politics really only emerged around WWII.
Go look up some revolutionary era newspapers, some Jacksonian era newspapers, some antebellum newspapers, some reconstruction newspapers, some gilded age newspapers ... you'll see bias not even fox news would stoop to.
That is a really twisted interpretation of the word "progressive".
A progressive believes that the current system not working as well as it should, and that it must be improved from within.
Compare to revolutionary that believes that change is needed, but the system can not be changed from within.
Compare to a conservative who approves of the current state of government.
A Regressive believes that recent changes have been for the worse and seeks to repeal them.
None of these infer as to what direction they believe the change should be in. These are the meanings of these words untwisted by any personal and political agenda. Other political terms like liberal, right and left are somewhat more open to interpretation.
There is. For instance Germany has the ARD, which in turn consists of broadcasting entities in each federal state, controlled by the respective state.
The broadcasting entities are producing their own magazines and news broadcasts, but all are broadcasted via the same network. Because different states lean differently, you have pretty leftist magazines sharing time slots with pretty conservative magazines, you have rather green magazines running one week and at the same time the next week very pro business magazines, depending on the broadcasting entities which produces them.
The system is not perfect, but at least it gets somewhat more balanced than just having one controlling entity for everything.