What this means is people who believe fake news do so mainly because they aren’t thinking, not because they’re thinking in a partisan way. It turns out that cognitive laziness, rather than motivated reasoning, better explains our susceptibility to fake news.

Yes, but…

Two things:

First, in 2016 Hillary Clinton got nearly 66 million votes: as noted in The New Yorker, this is more votes than any white man in history and several million more than the particular white guy who won on a technicality (the Electoral College, vestigial tail of Consitutional compromises over slavery). As the main target of fake news and ridiculously biased reporting, Hillary Clinton’s vote totals show that there are 66 million people (at least) in this country who did not fall for it.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, ‘Laziness’ is a judgement and doesn’t explain why people are involved in politics in the first place if they aren’t going to invest any intellectual capital in the act. Laziness explains people who don’t vote. It doesn’t, per se, explain people who do vote.

The likelier explanation — yet, also a judgement — is that they are, at some level, cognitively aware of the deep and abiding wrongness of their choices: deep down they know they are wrong but cannot face it openly. Believing in false reporting is a way of doubling down, as well as assuming a rapport with all the other people who are sharing the false reportage and expressing the wrong ideas. It’s not laziness, per se, but a form of self-protective self-perpetuating group-think. But, yeah, it sure looks like laziness.