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Too bad for Trump virtually nobody does that, and most avenues silo you away from trying to. You have the official spin teams like NYT and Snopes somehow leaving you believing a lie while still only telling the technical truth themselves. Then all the actual independents who did their own research get siloed into a "misinformation" or "conspiracy theorist" bucket. And then, if you manage to break through all those barriers, if you try to share what you learned with anyone, they've been so conditioned they'll still act like you are the weirdo for putting that much effort in or caring so much, and discard what you say.
In some ways, that's the beauty of it. It only has to work once per person. A person who has seen the media gestalt lie its ass off once willl probably develop amnesia and remain a goodthinker. Eventually though, the statement "the media lies its ass off" will lodge in their memeplex like a grain of sand.
And, like a grain of sand it will grow into a pearl that takes up increasingly large amounts of space whenever the topic rears its head
Even this works to Trump's advantage. I'm sure you've seen all the pearl-clutching opinion pieces about how conspiratorial thinking is destroying democracy. It's all the same pipeline. After a certain point, realizing that the media can and will bullshit you means that there's no going back to those outlets. The only way is forward, even if forward sends you to (or through) crazy town.
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I've already heard two independent reports that some person watching the debate heard the claim about eating cats and dogs and Googled it, thus finding out that there is some controversy over Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio and the disappearance of house pets. At that point, they aren't thinking "Trump lied to me!" they're thinking about the crazy story they hadn't heard of yet.
It does happen. Whether it makes a difference? I don't know.
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