Freshmen get new challenge.

Byline: Andrea Damewood The Register-Guard

It's a plain and simple truth: People, by their nature, just don't like talking to people with whom they disagree, public policy expert and author Kathleen Hall Jamieson told several hundred incoming University of Oregon freshmen Sunday.

Instead, they look for information that already confirms what they believe.

They marry, befriend and associate with those who hold similar values, scrutinizing and dismissing opposing viewpoints as loony or extreme.

And that, Jamieson said, is a big problem.

"If you're all hunkered down in your like-minded community, reinforced by the media, are you more likely to think the (opposing) person over there is kind of nutty?" she asked. "Does it create an environment where we can come to a common good?"

Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and author of "Unspun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation," challenged the new college students to make a list of where they stand on controversial topics such as Iraq, abortion and gun control.

Their four years of education will have been successful, she told them, if they can look at that list at graduation, and at least have challenged some of those positions.

The best way to hone that skill is to challenge what your own side is telling you, Jamieson said, showing several political ads from both liberal and conservative groups that she said were totally inaccurate.

After such ads aired, a poll revealed that nearly every person in the party that released the advertisement believed the false information.

"We drop our tests of plausibility, because we're so locked into what we believe," she said after showing an ad from 2004 claiming that presidential candidate John Kerry voted to cut intelligence spending by $6 billion "after the first terrorist attack."

What wasn't said is the "first attack" referenced in the ad happened in 1993, she said.

She also showed an ad from the Kerry camp that implied President George Bush vowed to cut current Social Security benefits by 30 to 45 percent.

"Bush would never tell the most reliable voting bloc that he would cut their benefits ... right before the election," she said.

Smart citizens should challenge their own political side's claims, Jamieson said. "If the system works, we police our own side," she said. "We should stand up and say, `No, we don't argue that way.' But we do very little of it."

Jamieson urged the freshmen to listen to both liberal Air America and conservative Rush Limbaugh on the radio, and to converse and try to understand from where their liberal or conservative neighbor is coming.

"We can't afford to have a citizenry that is hunkered down in its own ideology," she said. "The problems are too real, too immediate. Your generation has to be different."