There probably is a small group of media consumers out there somewhere in the world who are more misinformed, overall, than Fox News viewers. But if you only consider mainstream U.S. television news outlets with major audiences (e.g., numbering in the millions), it really is true that Fox viewers are the most misled based on all the available evidence—especially in areas of political controversy. This will come as little surprise to liberals, perhaps, but the evidence for it—evidence in Stewart’s favor—is pretty overwhelming.

My goal here is to explore the underlying causes for this “Fox News effect”—explaining how this station has brought about a hurricane-like intensification of factual error, misinformation and unsupportable but ideologically charged beliefs on the conservative side of the aisle. First, though, let’s begin by surveying the evidence about how misinformed Fox viewers actually are.

Based upon my research, I have located seven separate studies that support Stewart’s claim about Fox, and none that undermine it. Six of these studies were available at the time that PolitFact took on Stewart; one of them is newer.

The studies all take a similar form: These are public opinion surveys that ask citizens about their beliefs on factual but contested issues, and also about their media habits. Inevitably, some significant percentage of citizens are found to be misinformed about the facts, and in a politicized way—but not only that. The surveys also find that those who watch Fox are more likely to be misinformed, their views of reality skewed in a right-wing direction. In some cases, the studies even show that watching more Fox makes the misinformation problem worse.

So with that, here are the studies.

Iraq War

In 2003, a survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland found widespread public misperceptions about the Iraq war. For instance, many Americans believed the U.S. had evidence that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had been collaborating in some way with al-Qaida, or was involved in the 9-11 attacks; many also believed that the much touted “weapons of mass destruction” had been found in the country after the U.S. invasion, when they hadn’t. But not everyone was equally misinformed: “The extent of Americans’ misperceptions vary significantly depending on their source of news,” PIPA reported. “Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions.” For instance, 80 percent of Fox viewers held at least one of three Iraq-related misperceptions, more than a variety of other types of news consumers, and especially NPR and PBS users. Most strikingly, Fox watchers who paid more attention to the channel were more likely to be misled.

Global Warming

At least two studies have documented that Fox News viewers are more misinformed about this subject.

In a late 2010 survey, Stanford University political scientist Jon Krosnick and visiting scholar Bo MacInnis found that “more exposure to Fox News was associated with more rejection of many mainstream scientists’ claims about global warming, with less trust in scientists, and with more belief that ameliorating global warming would hurt the U.S. economy.” Frequent Fox viewers were less likely to say the Earth’s temperature has been rising and less likely to attribute this temperature increase to human activities. In fact, there was a 25 percentage point gap between the most frequent Fox News watchers (60 percent) and those who watch no Fox News (85 percent) in whether they think global warming is “caused mostly by things people do or about equally by things people do and natural causes.”

In a much more comprehensive study released in late 2011 (too late for Stewart or for PolitiFact), American University communications scholar Lauren Feldman and her colleagues reported on their analysis of a 2008 national survey, which found that “Fox News viewing manifests a significant, negative association with global warming acceptance.” Viewers of the station were less likely to agree that “most scientists think global warming is happening” and less likely to think global warming is mostly caused by human activities, among other measures.

Health Care

In 2009, an NBC survey found “rampant misinformation” about the healthcare reform bill before Congress — derided on the right as “Obamacare.” It also found that Fox News viewers were much more likely to believe this misinformation than average members of the general public. “72 percent of self-identified Fox News viewers believe the healthcare plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants, 79 percent of them say it will lead to a government takeover, 69 percent think that it will use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, and 75 percent believe that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly,” the survey found.

By contrast, among CNN and MSNBC viewers, only 41 percent believed the illegal immigrant falsehood, 39 percent believed in the threat of a “government takeover” of healthcare (40 percentage points less), 40 percent believed the falsehood about abortion, and 30 percent believed the falsehood about “death panels” (a 45 percent difference!).

In early 2011, the Kaiser Family Foundation released another survey on public misperceptions about healthcare reform. The poll asked 10 questions about the newly passed healthcare law and compared the “high scorers”—those that answered 7 or more correct—based on their media habits. The result was that “higher shares of those who report CNN (35 percent) or MSNBC (39 percent) as their primary news source [got] 7 or more right, compared to those that report mainly watching Fox News (25 percent).”

“Ground Zero Mosque” 

In late 2010, two scholars at the Ohio State University studied public misperceptions about the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”—and in particular, the prevalence of a series of rumors depicting those seeking to build this Islamic community center and mosque as terrorist sympathizers, anti-American, and so on. All of these rumors had, of course, been dutifully debunked by fact-checking organizations. The result? “People who use Fox News believe more of the rumors we asked about and they believe them more strongly than those who do not.”

The 2010 Election

In late 2010, the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) once again singled out Fox in a survey about misinformation during the 2010 election. Out of 11 false claims studied in the survey, PIPA found that “almost daily” Fox News viewers were “significantly more likely than those who never watched it” to believe 9 of them, including the misperceptions that “most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring” (they do), that “it is not clear that President Obama was born in the United States” (he was), that “most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses” (it either saved or created several million), that “most economists have estimated the healthcare law will worsen the deficit” (they have not), and so on.

It is important to note that in this study—by far the most critiqued of the bunch—the examples of misinformation studied were all closely related to prominent issues in the 2010 midterm election, and indeed, were selected precisely because they involved issues that voters said were of greatest importance to them, like healthcare and the economy. That was the main criterion for inclusion, explains PIPA senior research scholar Clay Ramsay. “People said, here’s how I would rank that as an influence on my vote,” says Ramsay, “so everything tested is at least a 5 on a zero-to-10 scale.”

Politifact Swings and Misses

In attempting to fact-check Jon Stewart on the subject of Fox News and misinformation, PolitiFact simply appeared out of its depth. The author of the article in question, Louis Jacobson, only cited two of the studies above–“Iraq War” and “2010 Election”—though six out of seven were available at the time he was writing. And then he suggested that the “2010 Election” study should “carry less weight” due to various methodological objections.

Meanwhile, Jacobson dug up three separate studies that we can dismiss as irrelevant. That’s because these studies did not concern misinformation, but rather, how informed news viewers are about basic political facts like the following: “who the vice president is, who the president of Russia is, whether the Chief Justice is conservative, which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives and whether the U.S. has a trade deficit.”

A long list of public opinion studies have shown that too few Americans know the answers to such basic questions. That’s lamentable, but also off point at the moment. These are not politically contested issues, nor are they skewed by an active misinformation campaign. As a result, on such issues many Americans may be ill-informed but liberals and conservatives are nevertheless able to agree.

Jon Stewart was clearly talking about political misinformation. He used the word “misinformed.” And for good reason: Misinformation is by far the bigger torpedo to our national conversation, and to any hope of a functional politics. “It’s one thing to be not informed,” explains David Barker, a political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied conservative talk-radio listeners and Fox viewers. “It’s another thing to be misinformed, where you’re confident in your incorrectness. That’s the thing that’s really more problematic, democratically speaking—because if you’re confidently wrong, you’re influencing people.”

Thus PolitiFact’s approach was itself deeply uninformed, and underscores just how poorly our mainstream political discourse deals with the problem of systematic right wing misinformation.

Fox and the Republican Brain

The evidence is clear, then—the Politifact-Stewart flap notwithstanding, Fox viewers are the most misinformed. But then comes the truly interesting and important question: Why is that the case?

To answer it, we’ll first need to travel back to the 1950s, and the pioneering work of the Stanford psychologist and cult infiltrator, Leon Festinger.

In his 1957 book “A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance,” Festinger built on his famous study of a doomsday cult called the Seekers, and other research, to lay out many ramifications of his core idea about why human beings contort the evidence to fit their beliefs, rather than conforming those beliefs to the evidence. That included a prediction about how those who are highly committed to a belief or view should go about seeking information that touches on that powerful conviction.

Festinger suggested that once we’ve settled on a core belief, this ought to shape how we gather information. More specifically, we are likely to try to avoid encountering claims and information that challenge that belief, because these will create cognitive dissonance. Instead, we should go looking for information that affirms the belief. The technical (and less than ideal) term for this phenomenon is “selective exposure”: what it means is that we selectively choose to be exposed to information that is congenial to our beliefs, and to avoid “inconvenient truths” that are uncongenial to them.

If Festinger’s ideas about “selective exposure” are correct, then the problem with Fox News may not solely be that it is actively causing its viewers to be misinformed. It’s very possible that Fox could be imparting misinformation even as politically conservative viewers are also seeking the station out—highly open to it and already convinced about many falsehoods that dovetail with their beliefs. Thus, they would come into the encounter with Fox not only misinformed and predisposed to become more so, but inclined to be very confident about their incorrect beliefs and to impart them to others. In this account, political misinformation on the right would be driven by a kind of feedback loop, with both Fox and its viewers making the problem worse.

Psychologists and political scientists have extensively studied selective exposure, and within the research literature, the findings are often described as mixed. But that’s not quite right. In truth, some early studies seeking to confirm Festinger’s speculation had problems with their designs and often failed—and as a result, explains University of Alabama psychologist William Hart, the field of selective exposure research “stagnated” for several decades. But it has since undergone a dramatic revival—driven, not surprisingly, by the modern explosion of media choices and growing political polarization in the U.S. And thanks to a new wave of better-designed and more rigorous studies, the concept has become well established.

“Selective exposure is the clearest way to look at how people create their own realities, based upon their views of the world,” says Hart. “Everybody knows this happens.”

Indeed, by 2009, Hart and a team of researchers were able to perform a meta-analysis—a statistically rigorous overview of published studies on selective exposure—that pooled together 67 relevant studies, encompassing almost 8,000 individuals. As a result, he found that people overall were nearly twice as likely to consume ideologically congenial information as to consume ideologically inconvenient information—and in certain circumstances, they were even more likely than that.

When are people most likely to seek out self-affirming information? Hart found that they’re most vulnerable to selective exposure if they have defensive goals—for instance, being highly committed to a preexisting view, and especially a view that is tied to a person’s core values. Another defensive motivation identified in Hart’s study was closed-mindedness, which makes a great deal of sense. It is probably part of the definition of being closed-minded, or dogmatic, that you prefer to consume information that agrees with what you already believe.

So who’s closed-minded? Multiple studies have shown that political conservatives—e.g., Fox viewers–tend to have a higher need for closure. Indeed, this includes a group called right-wing authoritarians, who are increasingly prevalent in the Republican Party. This suggests they should also be more likely to select themselves into belief-affirming information streams, like Fox News or right-wing talk radio or the Drudge Report. Indeed, a number of research results support this idea.

In a study of selective exposure during the 2000 election, for instance, Stanford University’s Shanto Iyengar and his colleagues mailed a multimedia informational CD about the two candidates—Bush and Gore—to 600 registered voters and then tracked its use by a sample of 220 of them. As a result, they found that Bush partisans chose to consume more information about Bush than about Gore—but Democrats and liberals didn’t show the same bias toward their own candidate.

Selective exposure has also been directly tested several times in authoritarians. In one case, researchers at Stony Brook University primed more and less authoritarian subjects with thoughts of their own mortality. Afterwards, the authoritarians showed a much stronger preference than non-authoritarians for reading an article that supported their existing view on the death penalty, rather than an article presenting the opposing view or a “balanced” take on the issue. As the authors concluded: “highly authoritarian individuals, when threatened, attempt to reduce anxiety by selectively exposing themselves to attitude-validating information, which leads to ‘stronger’ opinions that are more resistant to attitude change.”

The psychologist Robert Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba has also documented an above average amount of selective exposure in right wing authoritarians. In one case, he gave students a fake self-esteem test, in which they randomly received either above average or below average scores. Then, everyone—the receivers of both low and high scores—was given the opportunity to say whether he or she would like to read a summary of why the test was valid. The result was striking: Students who scored low on authoritarianism wanted to learn about the validity of the test regardless of how they did on it. There was virtually no difference between high and low scorers. But among the authoritarian students, there was a big gap: 73 percent of those who got high self-esteem scores wanted to read about the test’s validity, while only 47 percent of those who got low self-esteem scores did.

Authoritarians, Altemeyer concludes, “maintain their beliefs against challenges by limiting their experiences, and surrounding themselves with sources of information that will tell them they are right.”

The evidence on selective exposure, as well as the clear links between closed-mindedness and authoritarianism, gives good grounds for believing that this phenomenon should be more common and more powerful on the political right. Lest we leap to the conclusion that Fox News is actively misinforming its viewers most of the time—rather than enabling them through its very existence—that’s something to bear in mind.

Disinformation Passing as “News”

None of which is to suggest that Fox isn’t also guilty of actively misinforming viewers. It certainly is.

The litany of misleading Fox segments and snippets is quite extensive—especially on global warming, where it seems that every winter snowstorm is an excuse for more doubt-mongering. No less than Fox’s Washington managing editor Bill Sammon was found to have written, in a 2009 internal staff email exposed by MediaMatters, that the network’s journalists should:

. . . refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.

And global warming is hardly the only issue where Fox actively misinforms its viewers. The polling data here, from the Project on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) are very telling.

PIPA’s study of misinformation in the 2010 election didn’t just show that Fox News viewers were more misinformed than viewers of other channels. It also showed that watching more Fox made believing in nine separate political misperceptions more likely. And that was a unique effect, unlike any observed with the other news channels that were studied. “With all of the other media outlets, the more exposed you were, the less likely you were to have misinformation,” explains PIPA’s director, political psychologist Steven Kull. “While with Fox, the more exposure you had, in most cases, the more misinformation you had. And that is really, in a way, the most powerful factor, because it strongly suggests they were actually getting the information from Fox.”

Indeed, this effect was even present in non-Republicans–another indicator that Fox is probably its cause. As Kull explains, “even if you’re a liberal Democrat, you are affected by the station.” If you watched Fox, you were more likely to believe the nine falsehoods, regardless of your political party affiliation.

In summary, then, the “science” of Fox News clearly shows that its viewers are more misinformed than the viewers of other stations, and are indeed this way for ideological reasons. But these are not necessarily the reasons that liberals may assume. Instead, the Fox “effect” probably occurs both because the station churns out falsehoods that conservatives readily accept—falsehoods that may even seem convincing to some liberals on occasion—but also because conservatives are overwhelmingly inclined to choose to watch Fox to begin with.

At the same time, it’s important to note that they’re also disinclined to watch anything else. Fox keeps constantly in their minds the idea that the rest of the media are “biased” against them, and conservatives duly respond by saying other media aren’t worth watching—it’s just a pack of lies. According to Public Policy Polling’s annual TV News Trust Poll (the 2011 run), 72 percent of conservatives say they trust Fox News, but they also say they strongly distrust NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN. Liberals and moderates, in contrast, trust all of these outlets more than they distrust them (though they distrust Fox). This, too, suggests conservative selective exposure.

And there is an even more telling study of “Fox-only” behavior among conservatives, from Stanford’s Shanto Iyengar and Kyu Hahn of Yonsei University, in Seoul, South Korea. They conducted a classic left-right selective exposure study, giving members of different ideological groups the chance to choose stories from a news stream that provided them with a headline and a news source logo—Fox, CNN, NPR, and the BBC—but nothing else. The experiment was manipulated so that the same headline and story was randomly attributed to different news sources. The result was that Democrats and liberals were definitely less inclined to choose Fox than other sources, but spread their interest across the other outlets when it came to news. But Republicans and conservatives overwhelmingly chose Fox for hard news and even for soft news, and ignored other sources. “The probability that a Republican would select a CNN or NPR report was around 10%,” wrote the authors.

In other words Fox News is both deceiver and enabler simultaneously. First, its existence creates the opportunity for conservatives to exercise their biases, by selecting into the Fox information stream, and also by imbibing Fox-style arguments and claims that can then fuel biased reasoning about politics, science, and whatever else comes up.

But at the same time, it’s also likely that conservatives, tending to be more closed-minded and more authoritarian, have a stronger emotional need for an outlet like Fox, where they can find affirmation and escape from the belief challenges constantly presented by the “liberal media.” Their psychological need for something affirmative is probably stronger than what’s encountered on the opposite side of the aisle—as is their revulsion towards allegedly liberal (but really centrist) media outlets.

And thus we find, at the root of our political dysfunction, a classic nurture-nature mélange. The penchant for selective exposure is rooted in our psychology and our brains. Closed-mindedness and authoritarianism—running stronger in some of us than in others—likely are as well.

But nevertheless, it took the emergence of a station like Fox News before these tendencies could be fully activated—polarizing America not only over politics, but over reality itself.

The evidence for this came in the form of polling data from the General Social Survey, which for decades has asked people to rate their level of confidence in the leaders of a variety of institutions. Even at a time of declining trust in institutions in general, science always seemed to fare pretty well by this metric. “In 2008, more Americans expressed a ‘great deal’ of confidence in scientific leaders than in the leaders of any other institution except the military,” noted the National Science Foundation’s 2010 “Science and Engineering Indicators” report, which serves as a clearinghouse for these sorts of public opinion findings.

Last week, however, such claims seemed to all but fall apart.

In a new study published in the American Sociological Review, Gordon Gauchat of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill analyzed responses to this “confidence in institutions” question — which  has been asked since 1974 — based on the political ideology of the respondents. And in doing so, he found that confidence in the scientific community had declined quite dramatically among self-described U.S. political conservatives. This downward trend in the data, says Gauchat, had previously been hidden by “not breaking out the political part of it” — by treating all Americans as a uniform group.

And not only did Gauchat find that, from 1974 to 2010, conservatives marched away from the scientific community. He also found, quite disturbingly, that this had a surprising and paradoxical relationship with their levels of education. It turns out that it was the educated conservatives who became the most distrusting of science over time — a phenomenon that I have called the “smart idiot” effect, and that likely reflects their higher level of political knowledge and engagement. Liberals, in contrast, remained relatively uniform in their trust in science over the period.

In one sense, I suppose I should be gratified by these results: Gauchat explicitly set out to test the thesis of my 2005 book “The Republican War on Science,” and writes that his results provide “strong evidence” in my favor. (Not that this is the sort of thing that you want to be right about.) But how do we explain this occurrence — this big move, by conservatives, away from science?

Just as I did in “Republican War,” Gauchat points the finger at the rise of the “New Right” as a political movement in the 1960s and 1970s. He underscores how upstart conservatives generated their own alternative sources of expertise — in other words, created their own version of reality, scientific and otherwise — at think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute. The goal was to hit back against liberal academia, as well as the intellectuals and scientists who worked there.

At the same time, conservatives also forged an alternative media universe — centered on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show — where scientists often fell under attack on a key set of politicized issues like global warming, evolution, embryonic stem cell research, and many others.

The idea, then, is that conservatives came to define the worlds of science and academia as a liberal domain that was biased against them — one they had to actively combat by generating their own sources of “counter-expertise.” And naturally, this led to decreased trust in scientists and their institutions, especially among the most politically attuned conservatives, who were most familiar with the nature of these battles, and tracked them most closely.

Sounds plausible enough — but is that the full story?

There’s no doubt it’s partly true; but in recent years, I’ve come to question whether it is a complete account. In particular, in my new book, “The Republican Brain,” I emphasize that beyond such surface-level political and sociological explanations, we also have to examine the powerful sub-surface psychological determinants of political behavior. Really, you need both types of explanations, combined, before you can understand many political phenomena.

In a psychological sense, there are many reasons to think that self-described political conservatives today are just different people than they were in 1974 — more rigid, more closed-minded. Consider, for instance, the work of political scientists Marc Hetherington of Vanderbilt and Jonathan Weiler, also of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. In their 2009 book “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics,” Hetherington and Weiler show that the U.S. became not only more politically divided, but also more psychologically divided, during the time period in question.

The chief catalyst for this development was Nixon’s infamous “Southern Strategy” and the rise of an array of “culture war” issues during the 1960s and 1970s. As a result of these forces, Hetherington and Weiler explain, a group of people called “authoritarians” — a generally conservative personality type characterized by cognitive rigidity, viewing the world in black-and-white terms, and holding fixed beliefs, often fundamentalist Christian ones — became much more strongly clustered in the Republican Party, and the conservative movement, than they had been previously.

In other words, the “conservatives” analyzed in Gauchat’s study seem to have changed psychological identities over time.  According to Weiler, “those self-identifying as conservative have been increasingly likely to be authoritarians over the past generation.”

This occurred for a number of reasons, Weiler explains. Concerted attacks on “liberalism” pushed working-class whites — once supportive of the New Deal — away from embracing that label; instead, the term came to be more associated with the civil rights struggle, and later, with women’s rights and gay rights. At the same time, the political mobilization of conservative Christians — many of them authoritarians — helped draw a much stronger linkage between calling oneself a “conservative” and embracing religious fundamentalism. “As liberalism and conservatism came to be redefined,” explains Weiler, “authoritarians had reason to gravitate much more readily toward one ideological camp, and one political party.”

So under this theory, it’s not just that movement conservatives built think tanks that allowed for an end-run around scientific expertise. And it’s not just that they constantly attacked academia, where liberals and scientists were clustered. It’s also that people inclined to view the world in black and white terms increasingly came to call themselves “conservative” in the first place.

How does psychological authoritarianism set the stage for a distrust of science? If you see the world in an authoritarian way, then you’re more likely to dismiss your ideological opponents (scientists or otherwise) without compromise — to define them as an out-group, an “other.” At the same time, you’re also less likely to appreciate the nuanced, measured style of thinking and writing that is so typical of scientists (and for that matter, liberals). It just won’t feel right to you. Authoritarians are known for their intolerance of uncertainty; yet uncertainty is the lifeblood of science.

And indeed, if you look at the Tea Party today — a highly authoritarian group of people, according to Hetherington and Weiler — this is exactly what you see. Take the issue of global warming. Not only do Tea Partyers dismiss the overwhelming body of science showing that humans are causing it; polling data also show they’re confident they don’t need any more information about the issue. They’re not just wrong, then; it’s considerably worse than that. They’re wrong and also sure of themselves.

It is important to acknowledge that authoritarianism refers to a psychological trait or disposition, not an explicit ideology. At least theoretically, it’s content neutral. So it’s conceivable that in a very different political context, authoritarians might well have lined up behind science, rather than against it. That would be an odd political case, though; especially in a democracy, it’s not very likely that authoritarianism and science will get along very well together, any more than that authoritarianism and liberalism will go together. They’re just such deeply opposed ways of thinking — and being. You could argue that the clash between science and authoritarianism dates all the way back to the time of Galileo, if not farther.

Gauchat’s findings are the farthest thing from heartening — especially when combined with Hetherington and Weiler’s. But together, they do give us an opportunity to examine the root causes of the ideological war on science now being prosecuted by political conservatives in the U.S. You can’t begin to address a problem until you find its source. And in this case — as in so many others — that source appears to lie in both politics and also psychology, combined.

Those facts are these: Humans, since the Industrial Revolution, have been burning more and more fossil fuels to power their societies, and this has led to a steady accumulation of greenhouse gases, and especially carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. At this point, very simple physics takes over, and you are pretty much doomed, by what scientists refer to as the “radiative” properties of carbon dioxide molecules (which trap infrared heat radiation that would otherwise escape to space), to have a warming planet. Since about 1995, scientists have not only confirmed that this warming is taking place, but have also grown confident that it has, like the gun in a murder mystery, our fingerprint on it. Natural fluctuations, although they exist, can’t explain what we’re seeing. The only reasonable verdict is that humans did it, in the atmosphere, with their cars and their smokestacks.

Such is what is known to science–what is true (no matter what Rick Santorum might say). But the Pew data showed that humans aren’t as predictable as carbon dioxide molecules. Despite a growing scientific consensus about global warming, as of 2008 Democrats and Republicans had cleaved over the facts stated above, like a divorcing couple. One side bought into them, one side didn’t—and if anything, knowledge and intelligence seemed to be worsening matters.

Buried in the Pew report was a little chart showing the relationship between one’s political party affiliation, one’s acceptance that humans are causing global warming, and one’s level of education. And here’s the mind-blowing surprise: For Republicans, having a college degree didn’t appear to make one any more open to what scientists have to say. On the contrary, better-educated Republicans were more skeptical of modern climate science than their less educated brethren. Only 19 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed that the planet is warming due to human actions, versus 31 percent of non-college-educated Republicans.

For Democrats and Independents, the opposite was the case. More education correlated with being more accepting of climate science—among Democrats, dramatically so. The difference in acceptance between more and less educated Democrats was 23 percentage points.

This was my first encounter with what I now like to call the “smart idiots” effect: The fact that politically sophisticated or knowledgeable people are often more biased, and less persuadable, than the ignorant. It’s a reality that generates endless frustration for many scientists—and indeed, for many well-educated, reasonable people.

And most of all, for many liberals.

Let’s face it: We liberals and progressives are absolutely outraged by partisan misinformation. Lies about “death panels.” People seriously thinking that President Obama is a Muslim, not born in the United States. Climate-change denial. Debt ceiling denial. These things drive us crazy, in large part because we can’t comprehend how such intellectual abominations could possibly exist.

And not only are we enraged by lies and misinformation; we want to refute them—to argue, argue, argue about why we’re right and Republicans are wrong. Indeed, we often act as though right-wing misinformation’s defeat is nigh, if we could only make people wiser and more educated (just like us) and get them the medicine that is correct information.

No less than President Obama’s science adviser John Holdren (a man whom I greatly admire, but disagree with in this instance) has stated, when asked how to get Republicans in Congress to accept our mainstream scientific understanding of climate change, that it’s an “education problem.”

But the facts, the scientific data, say otherwise.

Indeed, the rapidly growing social scientific literature on the resistance to global warming (see for examples here and here) says so pretty unequivocally. Again and again, Republicans or conservatives who say they know more about the topic, or are more educated, are shown to be more in denial, and often more sure of themselves as well—and are confident they don’t need any more information on the issue.

Tea Party members appear to be the worst of all. In a recent survey by Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, they rejected the science of global warming even more strongly than average Republicans did. For instance, considerably more Tea Party members than Republicans incorrectly thought there was a lot of scientific disagreement about global warming (69 percent to 56 percent). Most strikingly, the Tea Party members were very sure of themselves—they considered themselves “very well-informed” about global warming and were more likely than other groups to say they “do not need any more information” to make up their minds on the issue.

But it’s not just global warming where the “smart idiot” effect occurs. It also emerges on nonscientific but factually contested issues, like the claim that President Obama is a Muslim. Belief in this falsehood actually increased more among better-educated Republicans from 2009 to 2010 than it did among less-educated Republicans, according to research by George Washington University political scientist John Sides.

The same effect has also been captured in relation to the myth that the healthcare reform bill empowered government “death panels.” According to research by Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, Republicans who thought they knew more about the Obama healthcare plan were “paradoxically more likely to endorse the misperception than those who did not.” Well-informed Democrats were the opposite—quite certain there were no “death panels” in the bill.

The Democrats also happened to be right, by the way.

The idealistic, liberal, Enlightenment notion that knowledge will save us, or unite us, was even put to a scientific test last year—and it failed badly.

Yale researcher Dan Kahan and his colleagues set out to study the relationship between political views, scientific knowledge or reasoning abilities, and opinions on contested scientific issues like global warming. In their study, more than 1,500 randomly selected Americans were asked about their political worldviews and their opinions about how dangerous global warming and nuclear power are. But that’s not all: They were also asked standard questions to determine their degree of scientific literacy (e.g, “Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria—true or false?”) as well as their numeracy or capacity for mathematical reasoning (e.g., “If Person A’s chance of getting a disease is 1 in 100 in 10 years, and person B’s risk is double that of A, what is B’s risk?”).

The result was stunning and alarming. The standard view that knowing more science, or being better at mathematical reasoning, ought to make you more accepting of mainstream climate science simply crashed and burned.

Instead, here was the result. If you were already part of a cultural group predisposed to distrust climate science—e.g., a political conservative or “hierarchical-individualist”—then more science knowledge and more skill in mathematical reasoning tended to make you even more dismissive. Precisely the opposite happened with the other group—“egalitarian-communitarians” or liberals—who tended to worry more as they knew more science and math. The result was that, overall, more scientific literacy and mathematical ability led to greater political polarization over climate change—which, of course, is precisely what we see in the polls.

So much for education serving as an antidote to politically biased reasoning.

What accounts for the “smart idiot” effect?

For one thing, well-informed or well-educated conservatives probably consume more conservative news and opinion, such as by watching Fox News. Thus, they are more likely to know what they’re supposed to think about the issues—what people like them think—and to be familiar with the arguments or reasons for holding these views. If challenged, they can then recall and reiterate these arguments. They’ve made them a part of their identities, a part of their brains, and in doing so, they’ve drawn a strong emotional connection between certain “facts” or claims, and their deeply held political values. And they’re ready to argue.

What this suggests, critically, is that sophisticated conservatives may be very different from unsophisticated or less-informed ones. Paradoxically, we would expect less informed conservatives to be easier to persuade, and more responsive to new and challenging information.

In fact, there is even research suggesting that the most rigid and inflexible breed of conservatives—so-called authoritarians—do not really become their ideological selves until they actually learn something about politics first. A kind of “authoritarian activation” needs to occur, and it happens through the development of political “expertise.” Consuming a lot of political information seems to help authoritarians feel who they are—whereupon they become more accepting of inequality, more dogmatically traditionalist, and more resistant to change.

So now the big question: Are liberals also “smart idiots”?

There’s no doubt that more knowledge—or more political engagement—can produce more bias on either side of the aisle. That’s because it forges a stronger bond between our emotions and identities on the one hand, and a particular body of facts on the other.

But there are also reason to think that, with liberals, there is something else going on. Liberals, to quote George Lakoff, subscribe to a view that might be dubbed “Old Enlightenment reason.” They really do seem to like facts; it seems to be part of who they are. And fascinatingly, in Kahan’s study liberals did not act like smart idiots when the question posed was about the safety of nuclear power.

Nuclear power is a classic test case for liberal biases—kind of the flip side of the global warming issue–for the following reason. It’s well known that liberals tend to start out distrustful of nuclear energy: There’s a long history of this on the left. But this impulse puts them at odds with the views of the scientific community on the matter (scientists tend to think nuclear power risks are overblown, especially in light of the dangers of other energy sources, like coal).

So are liberals “smart idiots” on nukes? Not in Kahan’s study. As members of the “egalitarian communitarian” group in the study—people with more liberal values–knew more science and math, they did not become more worried, overall, about the risks of nuclear power. Rather, they moved in the opposite direction from where these initial impulses would have taken them. They become less worried—and, I might add, closer to the opinion of the scientific community on the matter.

You may or may not support nuclear power personally, but let’s face it: This is not the “smart idiot” effect. It looks a lot more like open-mindedness.

What does all of this mean?

First, these findings are just one small slice of an emerging body of science on liberal and conservative psychological differences, which I discuss in detail in my forthcoming book. An overall result is definitely that liberals tend to be more flexible and open to new ideas—so that’s a possible factor lying behind these data. In fact, recent evidence suggests that wanting to explore the world and try new things, as opposed to viewing the world as threatening, may subtly push people toward liberal ideologies (and vice versa).

Politically and strategically, meanwhile, the evidence presented here leaves liberals and progressives in a rather awkward situation. We like evidence—but evidence also suggests that politics doesn’t work in the way we want it to work, or think it should. We may be the children of the Enlightenment—convinced that you need good facts to make good policies—but that doesn’t mean this is equally true for all of humanity, or that it is as true of our political opponents as it is of us.

Nevertheless, this knowledge ought to be welcomed, for it offers a learning opportunity and, frankly, a better way of understanding politics and our opponents alike. For instance, it can help us see through the scientific-sounding arguments of someone like Rick Santorum, who has been talking a lot about climate science lately—if only in order to bash it.

On global warming, Santorum definitely has an argument, and he has “facts” to cite. And he is obviously intelligent and capable—but not, apparently, able to see past his ideological biases. Santorum’s argument ultimately comes down to a dismissal of climate science and climate scientists, and even the embrace of a conspiracy theory, one in which the scientists of the world are conspiring to subvert economic growth (yeah, right).

Viewing all this as an ideologically defensive maneuver not only explains a lot, it helps us realize that refuting Santorum probably serves little purpose. He’d just come up with another argument and response, probably even cleverer than the last, and certainly just as appealing to his audience. We’d be much better concentrating our energies elsewhere, where people are more persuadable.

A more scientific understanding of persuasion, then, should not be seen as threatening. It’s actually an opportunity to do better—to be more effective and politically successful.

Indeed, if we believe in evidence then we should also welcome the evidence showing its limited power to persuade–especially in politicized areas where deep emotions are involved. Before you start off your next argument with a fact, then, first think about what the facts say about that strategy. If you’re a liberal who is emotionally wedded to the idea that rationality wins the day—well, then, it’s high time to listen to reason.

But there was nothing they could do about the gigantic impossibility at the center of the plot. While the high-energy proton collisions generated at CERN do occasionally produce minute quantities of antimatter — particles with the opposite electrical charge as protons and electrons, but the same mass, which can in turn be combined into atoms like antihydrogen — it’s not remotely enough to power a bomb. As CERN quips on a Web site devoted to “Angels & Demons,” antimatter “would be very dangerous if we could make a few grams of it, but this would take us billions of years.”

As its Web site attests, CERN has been forced to develop some pretty sophisticated P.R. tools in recent years. Before “Angels & Demons” came out, the institution had to counter widespread but baseless public concerns that its Large Hadron Collider — the source of antimatter in the film — might create black holes that would grow to devour Earth and kill us all. CERN researchers received death threats; lawsuits were filed to stop the collider’s operation. (Granted, the scientists scored a considerable hit when their hilarious YouTube video, the “Large Hadron Rap,” went viral and garnered more than 5 million views.)

The experience of CERN is, more broadly, the experience of science in our culture today. It is simultaneously admired and yet viewed as dangerously powerful and slightly malevolent — an uneasiness that comes across repeatedly in Hollywood depictions. As science-fiction film director James Cameron (“Aliens,” “Terminator,” “Titanic”) has observed, the movies tend to depict scientists “as idiosyncratic nerds or actively the villains.” That’s not only unfair to scientists: It’s unhealthy for the place of science in our culture — no small matter at a time of climate crisis, bioweapon threats, pandemic diseases and untold future controversies that will surely erupt as science continues to dramatically change our world and our politics. To begin to counter this problem, though, we need to wake up to a new recognition: Fixing the problem of science education in our schools, although very important, is not the sole solution. We also have to do something about the cultural standing of science — heavily influenced by politics and mass media — and that’s a very different matter.

There can be little serious doubt that entertainment depictions have consequences. Entertainment industry expert Marty Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, perhaps puts it best when he describes Hollywood films as the “unofficial curriculum of society.”

What do we learn from this curriculum about science? Well, just ask America’s kids. Researchers who have studied the stereotypical views of scientists held by American schoolchildren report that when they encounter real-life scientists who visit their classroom, the kids think someone’s pulling their leg, because the scientists aren’t anything like the big-screen version — mean, male, gray haired and mad. As one study author explained to the magazine Nature: “They might say the person was too ‘normal’ or too good-looking to be a scientist. The most heart-breaking thing is when they say, ‘I didn’t think he was real because he seemed to care about us.’”

To some extent these depictions may be changing today, as Hollywood appears to be finding a new interest in science. Yet with such images having been predominant for so long, is it any surprise that most Americans can’t name a scientific role model? And that those who can tend to name people like Bill Gates, Al Gore and Albert Einstein, who are either not scientists or not alive?

To better understand why science fares as it does in our culture, perhaps it will help to grapple with the legacy of a man who contributed vastly to science’s popular image today and who also embodied the seductive power of anti-scientific thinking: the late novelist, screenwriter and sometime anti-global-warming advocate Michael Crichton.

An M.D. who became a phenomenal entertainment industry success, Crichton was very much science’s man in Hollywood. Even with his many science-centered hits, ranging from “Jurassic Park” to “ER,” he still found time to lecture to scientific institutions and compose numerous nonfiction essays sharing his views on matters ranging from science in entertainment to climate change. He was, through and through, a paradox. His plots were meticulously researched and filled with science; yet at the same time — and most memorably in “Jurassic Park” — they depicted science going out of control, running amok, so that before long the bodies begin to pile up (or get digested).

And then toward the end of his career, Crichton produced a book that, for many in science, will live in infamy: 2004′s “State of Fear,” whose plot involves eco-terrorists trying to create natural disasters that will scare the public about global warming — which doesn’t, in the view of the novel’s heroic scientist-protagonist, even exist.

Let’s take these two halves of Crichton in sequence, as both embody important lessons about science in our culture. First, science in the entertainment media. Crichton had little patience for scientists’ complaints about ridiculous sci-fi plots and wild scientist stereotyping. In a 1999 lecture before the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he countered such gripes with his own perspective on why scientists will probably never be very happy with the products of Hollywood. As Crichton advised, there are at least four important rules of movies that just don’t mesh with the real process of research: “(i) Movie characters must be compelled to act. (ii) Movies need villains. (iii) Movie searches are dull. (iv) Movies must move.” Crichton argued that real science, with its long, drawn-out intellectual processes and frequent dead ends, simply can’t be reconciled with such exigencies. “The problems lie with the limitations of film as a visual storytelling medium,” he concluded. “You aren’t going to beat it.”

Crichton’s words are worth heeding. People who care about science and want it to come off better in the mass media can’t ignore his four rules of movie storytelling. They can’t ask for entertainment products in which the characters do actual research (or at least not much of it). They can’t ask for entertainment products that will be boring — a contradiction in terms. Rather, the goal must be to work toward finding ways of conveying information about science through film and other entertainment media without rendering them dull or unpalatable to audiences.

Now on to perhaps the most controversial part of Crichton’s career: His attack on the science of global warming in “State of Fear.” Crichton’s views on climate science have been pilloried by leading experts, and exhaustively refuted; there’s no need to retill that ground. But what’s instructive is the very fact that an M.D., a polymath, and indeed a man possessed of vast talents could nevertheless pen a wholly misleading and revisionist attack on climate change research. How could he have gone so horribly wrong in this instance?

The answer is that whatever happened, it had nothing to do with stupidity or ignorance, and it is surely nothing that a better high school education would have prevented. Crichton, don’t forget, was an M.D. He backed up his bestselling narratives with considerable scientific research himself, becoming, in a sense, an expert on each subject he tackled. It wasn’t that he didn’t know anything about climate change, but rather that he fell for various highly sophisticated — but still ultimately wrong — misinterpretations and misinformation. In this he was likely impelled either by political convictions, the desire to be a contrarian, or perhaps some combination of both.

What’s true of Crichton is true of the country. Polling data from the Pew organization reveals something fairly stunning about global warming and public opinion: If you’re a Republican, you are vastly less likely than a Democrat to accept the scientific consensus that global warming is brought about by human activities. You probably have a bias in favor of business and industry and don’t believe factory or automotive emissions exacerbate global warming. But that’s not all. The higher your level of education, the more skeptical you probably are that humans are to blame. Why? One possible reason is that more education makes you better at finding information and arguments that are supportive of what you already wanted to believe — as Crichton clearly did.

But the same thing can also be true of Democrats and liberals. Consider vaccination. An army of aggrieved parents nationwide, likely spurred in part by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., swears today that vaccines are the reason their children developed autism, and they seem virtually impossible to convince otherwise. Scientific research has soundly refuted this contention, but every time a new study on the subject comes out, the parents and their supporters have a “scientific” answer that allows them to retain their beliefs. They get their information from the Internet, from other parents of like mind, from a few non-mainstream researchers and doctors who continue to challenge the scientific consensus, and perhaps most of all — as was much the case with Crichton and global warming — from a group of celebrities, most prominently Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, who have made a cause of championing such misinformation and almost assuredly deeply believe in it.

Yet the parents who listen to McCarthy and Carrey — rather than the CDC and the FDA and the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine — tend to be well-to-do and highly educated. Calling them “ignorant” is hardly accurate. After all, they’ve probably done far more independent research on a scientific topic that interests and affects them than most other Americans have. Like Crichton, they may be misusing their intelligence, but it’s not as though they don’t have any to begin with. Perhaps Mark Twain put it best: “The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.”

But if politics and culture, as much as educational deficiencies, are the reasons we live in a society that is so science-challenged, perhaps we must think differently about how to address this disturbing problem. “We” in this case would be not only scientists but also anyone else who cares about making important decisions, particularly political ones, based on evidence and future-oriented thinking of a sort that science can best impart.

To this end, we need to realize that it isn’t wise — and usually isn’t even accurate — to denounce members of the public, or filmmakers and entertainers and celebrities, for scientific ignorance and for constantly getting it wrong. Instead, we must find ways of talking to these people, becoming aware of the constraints they’re working with, and try to help them see that science is no necessary enemy to the realities of filmmaking or what it takes to entertain an audience.

It is heartening, then, that in a major initiative, the U.S. scientific community has recently tried to connect with Hollywood on its own terms. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the elite membership society of American science, has just launched a project called the Science and Entertainment Exchange to “facilitate a valuable connection between the two communities.” A permanent National Academies office has been opened in Los Angeles to “make introductions, schedule briefings, and arrange for consultations to anyone developing science-based entertainment content.” This is a new initiative, so one cannot yet judge its impact, but early signs are promising — and it is precisely the sort of step the scientific world should be taking if it wants to heal its rifts with the entertainment industry.

As for dealing with rampant misinformation — refuting it is certainly important, but in the end this does only so much good if people have a powerful political or social reason to cling to their beliefs and if they have easily available arguments to throw in the face of scientific consensus. Denunciations from across an intellectual battlefield go only so far — the harder work involves talking to people, understanding the sources of their misconceptions, and figuring out how to move them to better ground. It won’t be easy, even then, to change minds. Humans cling to beliefs ferociously, because they are a core part of our identities. But that itself is precisely why we have to understand what makes people tick, and figure out where the real blocks to accepting science are.

Above all we should remember, as recent survey data released by the Pew organization underscores, that nobody really hates science. Rather, like Crichton, they might be fascinated by it while having their own reasons for problematic departures. But they’re still reachable, curious, intelligent. If we want a society that sees how science can save the world — instead of destroying it — that’s who we should be talking to most.

“Mrs. Flounders explained that she had selected the landmark tavern as the site for the reception ‘because they, too, were once bombed,’ she said, referring to the 1975 bombing by a Puerto Rican nationalist group in which four died and more than 60 were injured.”

This, as it happens, was one of the few post-Sept. 11 media references to the United States’ long history of grappling with Puerto Rican terrorism. That’s baffling, considering that as recently as August 1999, President Clinton offered to commute the sentences of 16 members of the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN (a Spanish acronym for the Armed Forces of National Liberation). It was FALN that was responsible for the Fraunces Tavern attack, as well as over 100 bombings during the 1970s and 1980s, largely in New York and Chicago.

Clinton’s move set off a firestorm at the time, leading the first lady, then running for the Senate in New York, to distance herself from her husband. It also ultimately resulted in a 95-2 Senate measure that condemned the clemencies and called them “deplorable.” Nevertheless, 11 former FALN members were freed soon afterward, and they returned to their homes in Chicago and Puerto Rico.

For once and future Clinton bashers, the subject of the FALN clemencies could hardly be more fruitful. Indeed, even as evidence mounts with each successive New York Times or Washington Post installment of what went wrong in fighting terrorism during the Clinton administration, Clinton’s detractors have overlooked a key piece of evidence. The former president’s behavior on the FALN issue almost certainly adds evidence that he was “soft on terrorism,” as well as revealing a breed of pre-Sept. 11 liberal-left politics that demanded the exculpation of former terrorists who were labeled “political prisoners.”

Those who lobbied for the clemencies have little interest in defending them today. Clemency supporters who did not return calls for this article include the Democratic Puerto Rican representatives Nydia Velázquez and José Serrano of New York and Luis Gutierrez of Chicago, who both acted as Washington proxies for nationalist-leaning Puerto Rican activists in the FALN furor and even pushed for unconditional pardons. (Clinton at least required that the prisoners renounce violence — and some would not, and were therefore denied clemency.) Collectively, Velázquez, Serrano and Gutierrez bowled over Puerto Rico’s single nonvoting representative to the U.S. Congress, the pro-statehood resident commissioner Carlos Romero-Barceló, who repudiated talk of the FALN members as “political prisoners” and opposed pardons outright, though he later accepted conditional clemency.

Ethnic one-upmanship appears to to be a factor in support for the FALN among Puerto Ricans. As one influential Puerto Rican, who asked not to be named, puts it, “Within the Puerto Rican or Hispanic context in the continental United States, to be in favor of independence and these people who were incarcerated is to place oneself on the most authentic left in your community. Which means you are the loudest mouth on ethnic matters. No one can accuse you of being insufficiently Puerto Rican.”

The ties between Puerto Rican identity politicking and the island’s often militant independentista movement dates back to the 1920s and 1930s, several decades after Spain ceded Puerto Rico to the United States at the close of the Spanish-American War. Those years saw the founding of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party under the leadership of the fiery, Harvard-educated orator Pedro Albizu Campos, an FALN role model who ultimately advocated Puerto Rico’s liberation from the United States by violent means.

In the 1960s, Puerto Rican nationalists forged enduring ties with the anti-Vietnam War left in the continental United States, and the cause of Puerto Rican independence became wedded to feminism, socialism and the sexual revolution. Today the Puerto Rican Independence Party wins just 4 percent of the vote in Puerto Rico, but independentistas are disproportionately represented among the island’s intelligentsia and cultural elite. And many of those leftists had no qualms about dubbing the FALN members “political prisoners” because in doing so, they were allying themselves with individuals who had been jailed for taking on that imperialist oppressor, the United States, and thereby dedicating their lives to Puerto Rican autonomy, cultural homogeneity and independence. Never mind the terrorism.

The Puerto Rican community in the continental United States also nourishes a culturally nationalist element, so it’s little surprise that other FALN clemency supporters who did not return calls for this article include former Bronx Democratic Party chairman Roberto Ramirez, and Jose Rivera, a former New York City Council member recently elected to the state Assembly. One person I did manage to speak with was Michael Deutsch of the Chicago-based People’s Law Office, who represented and continues to represent the 11 freed FALN members. Deutsch told me his clients were living “public, peaceful, law-abiding lives” and would not wish to comment, though he did say, “I don’t see any contradiction between what happened on Sept. 11 and their release prior to that,” he explained. “In my view, it’s kind of mixing apples and oranges.”

In one sense, Deutsch has a point. None of those offered clemency by Clinton had ever been directly implicated in any FALN attacks resulting in injuries or deaths. And FALN was never even close to being in the same league as al-Qaida (the Fraunces Tavern attack was an anomaly for the group, because civilians were victims). As Juan Manuel Carrión, a professor of sociology at the University of Puerto Rico, explains, “In Puerto Rico, we don’t really have a tradition of terrorism like in the Middle East, where you place bombs with nails to have the largest number of people hurt.”

Still, the individuals Clinton released were clearly core FALN members who were guilty of serious crimes including seditious conspiracy, armed robbery, weapons violations and unlawful storage of explosives, all committed to support terrorism. So what makes them so radically different from Zacarias Moussaoui, who allegedly helped conspire to commit the Sept. 11 attacks but was not directly involved?

Deutsch counters that his clients “had renounced violence years prior to their release.” But Sen. Clinton, for one, felt otherwise, announcing that the prisoners had not renounced violence quickly enough after President Clinton offered to commute their sentences. She then left her husband standing alone to defend them. Furthermore, under sentencing guidelines concerning “relevant conduct” (i.e., membership in a terrorist organization), which went into effect after the FALN members’ convictions in the late 1980s, a judge could have given them life imprisonment.

The contemporary outrage over the Clinton clemencies was thoroughly bipartisan in nature. At the time, the majority of elected Democrats, from Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, bitterly opposed Clinton’s decision, claiming, among other things, that it ignored the perspectives of FALN attack survivors and the families of FALN victims. Clinton’s move was even challenged from within his administration by FBI and Justice Department officials. All in all, a similar granting of clemency would have prompted something on the order of impeachment today. What the FALN members did has not changed; but the seriousness of their crimes in the minds of Americans has changed immensely.

Today, perhaps Clinton’s only remaining defenders on the FALN matter are that vocal minority of culturally nationalist Puerto Ricans, particularly the island’s independentistas, who operate at a significant political and cultural remove from most U.S. citizens — including Puerto Ricans. Indeed, in Puerto Rico before Sept. 11, according to the University of Puerto Rico’s Carrión, “pro-American people were claiming that they felt threatened in any attempt to show the American flag. Now they are showing it in pride.” The Puerto Rican left is, however, disproportionately represented in elite island circles such as academia and the media.

Puerto Rican nationalists and independentistas cite the strong resentments created by the United States’ century-old territorial relationship with Puerto Rico as justification for turning the “political prisoners” loose. The logic is well limned by Angelo Falcón, a senior policy executive at the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy in New York, who argues that the FALN controversy represents “an internal problem [for the U.S.] in terms of having a colony.” Representatives Velázquez, Serrano and Gutierrez all supported a similar view, at least tacitly, in their push for clemency for the FALN members. So, for that matter, did the Washington-based National Puerto Rican Coalition.

Now, of course, the equation of “terrorist” with “freedom fighter” (and “political prisoner”) seems completely out of touch. Juan Duchesne, a formerly pro-independence professor of Spanish at the University of Puerto Rico who has since supported statehood (a traditionally conservative option), claims that Puerto Rican elites refuse to confront a tradition of sometimes virulent anti-Americanism. Duchesne and a group of supporters recently published a Spanish-language article in the December issue of the university’s monthly newspaper, Diálogo, arguing that the island’s media had presented thoroughly skewed coverage of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

“There is a very anti-American line,” he explains. “It’s not just anti-American, it’s very reductive in its arguments concerning terrorism. So we claimed in the article that nobody is really talking about the true threat of fundamentalists or Islamic terrorism.”

Clinton does have one (at least presumptive) remaining supporter besides Puerto Rican leftists: Jimmy Carter. During his presidency Carter pardoned four Puerto Rican nationalists who in 1954 shot up the U.S. Congress, injuring five lawmakers; he also pardoned a nationalist convicted of plotting to kill President Truman in 1950. Carter approved of the Clinton FALN clemencies, as did, among others, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. But so far they, like Clinton, have managed to avoid the harsh judgment of hindsight.