Because of a string of coincidences I have spent most of my adult life in socially conservative surroundings. I went to college in Utah, work in the aerospace industry, and I’ve lived in Dan Burton’s and Duncan Hunter’s congressional districts. I currently live in Gilbert, Arizona, the heart of McCain/Romney territory. Because of this I’ve constantly had to defend my political views or keep my mouth shut. I’m not inclined to silence.
One staple of these arguments that has always puzzled me is the barrage of rightwing chain emails that are forwarded to me that contain just an incredible amount of misinformation.
Not that it is just misinformation, but claims that are easily demonstrated to be false. I received one today that supposedly compares Obama’s and McCain’s tax plans. The sources cited at the bottom of the email repudiate the claims being made in the text! And the guy that sent it to me quotes it verbatim in discussion.
I suspect there are thousands of these emails floating around. They run the spectrum from the nearly factual and serious to the hilariously outrageous. (The Clintons murdered twenty-three people and ran drugs out of Arkansas, Obama is a Muslim Manchurian Candidate.)
I spend entirely too much time trying to repudiate these emails. But then, everyone needs a hobby.
Perhaps I’m not on the right contact lists, but I never see any of these email chains with a progressive slant. I believe they are unique to the right. Not only that, but there must be a large number of people who are creating and distributing them and have to know that they are BS. There has to be a right wing BS factory out there somewhere generating all these emails. By the time they get to me, there are only a couple of degrees of separation, "a friend of a friend", still listed in the distribution chain.
Furthermore, these emails are a major source of information for a lot of these people. If you quote legitimate news sources to refute the claims, they argue that these emails forwarded from their brothers-in-law are more reliable than the "liberal media".
Has anyone studied this phenomena? I would be very interested in knowing the sources and methods if anyone has any insight. Are there any email chains out there with a progressive slant that are embarrassingly non-factual?