How vice can motivate distrust in elites and trust in fake news

This chapter discusses the vices of epistemic insensitivity and epistemic obstruction in special relation to contemporary political divides and contemporary habits of media consumption. It argues that both vices threaten to worsen political and social divisions between self-identified conservatives on the one hand, and those that the said self-identified conservatives themselves identify as “elites, " “liberal elites, " “experts, " “progressives, " or, “the left.” In turn, this worsening divide worsens distrust in news sources associated with “the wrong” political perspective. Partisans can become increasingly suspect of all news sources outside of their own political bubble; the entrenchment of the aforementioned vices makes persons more and more likely to deem any source outside their bubble “fake news.”.