Gotta love this short article in the Chicago Tribune summarizing a recent sociological study. Let's analyze it for examples of liberal bias, shall we?
It's popular wisdom that people become more rigid in their thinking, more politically and socially conservative as they age.
First erroneous liberal assumption: "more rigid in their thinking = more politically and socially conservative".
Could you imagine the writer saying this instead:
It's popular wisdom that people become wiser and clearer in their thinking, more politically and socially conservative as they age.
No, I can't imagine a reporter saying that, either.
OK, let's move on to the next paragraph.
Researchers who examined the attitudes of more than 46,000 Americans over a 32-year period found that their views about such issues as extramarital sex, race relations, childbirth outside marriage and homosexuality did not become less accepting as they grew older—and that a person's attitudes on such topics could not be predicted simply by their age.
The erroneous assumption here, of course, is that "conservative = less accepting", with the implication that "more accepting" (of anything, apparently) is good.
How about "conservative = less accepting of bad behavior and its socially-destructive consequences"?
Do you also notice how "race relations" is lumped in there with "extramarital sex, childbirth outside marriage, and homosexuality"? Now why is that? How did the study define "race relations", exactly? The conservatives I know are very non-bigoted people, so if there's an implication that conservatives are racist, that's yet another erroneous liberal assumption.
So, this study says that people don't get more conservative as they age. But the lead researcher, Nicholas Danigelis (who, by the way, was an instructor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison from 1972 - 1975) said there are three reasons why older people might "appear" to be more conservative than younger ones:
physiological changes such as hearing loss; the process of becoming socialized to believe certain ideas; and the "period effect"—having lived through a signal event such as World War II.
Ah, I see. If older people seem more conservative, they're either deaf (how does that figure in, exactly?), unable to think for themselves because of "socialization" (from which liberals are apparently exempt), and stuck in time (again, liberals -- aging hippies, perhaps? -- are apparently exempt).
Well. That explains everything. Or maybe nothing.
The one thing that this article really does explain is that the media is full of liberal bias.
But we already knew that, didn't we?
