… There is a vast and longstanding political science literature devoted to explaining the human propensity to fit opinion and even fact to partisan convenience — support for a war, for instance, tends to flip when a new party takes the White Houes — but many of the political scientists who study just this say they’ve never seen it the gap this wide. …
“It’s different today than the Whigs and the Tories fighting it out a couple hundred years ago — and it’s even different from the 50s or 60s — because today we have a hyper-partisan media,” said Paul Kellstedt, an associate professor of political science at Texas A&M University, who has argued that standard measures of economic confidence fail to take into account the partisan skew. …
An array of authors have blamed the shifting media for this deepening divide. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo’s 2008 book on the subject presented itself as a cheeky manual on on the problem of “learning to live in a post-fact society.” [cont.]
Ben Smith & Ruby Cramer, BuzzFeed