There’s a Reason Conservative Christians Are So Bad At Fact-Checking the News (Goes to Hemant Mehta’s Friendly Atheist blog at Patheos, more at the link):

It [literal reading of the Bible by conservatives] leads to an interesting question: Is there a connection between the way conservative Christians read the Bible and how they interpret the news?

That’s what Francesca Tripodi, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Virginia, set to find out. She just released a report (link to report at Patheos) documenting her initial findings, and the results are incredibly intriguing.

Tripodi studied two groups of Republicans in depth — a college group and a women’s group — to see how they “fact-checked” the news. And it turns out they’re not very good at it. (Surprise.) For example, one person she spoke to talked about how she researched candidates for upcoming elections: She Googled them.

“I literally type it in Google, and read the first three to five articles that pop up, because those are the ones that are obviously the most clicked and the most read, if they’re at the top of the list, or the most popular news outlets. So, I want to get a good sense of what other people are reading. So, that’s pretty much my go-to.”

That completely ignores how certain articles rise to the top of Google search results because people are searching for or talking about them. If we did a search for “Ted Cruz,” because of something newsworthy he said, the top results may include sites that routinely put out misinformation or spin the comment in a particular direction. Facebook faces a different problem, which is that our news feeds all look very different based on our preferences, likes, friends, and what we typically click on. I tend to see a lot of generally accurate and fact-based news sources in mine… but that’s exactly what the people who see Infowars would say.

But these people didn’t know that or get that. They just assumed the top results for them were automatically reliable.