Secretly envying the bovine tranquillity of newsless lives

Is there a God? What does dark matter look like? Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe? Who wrote Shakespeare's plays? Why do tens of millions of Americans adore Donald Trump when every news bulletin points to him being a lying, cheating, bullying, narcissistic swine?

Just as one had despaired of ever hearing a plausible answer to any of these Great Questions of Life suddenly (rapture!) one of them, the mystery of how millions of Americans manage to forgive Trump his crimes and misdemeanours, has been plausibly answered.

And that answer-explanation has a sweet simplicity about it, corroborating the principle of Occam's Razor. William of Ockham, a giant of medieval philosophy, held that whenever something seems inexplicable the simplest explanation is likely to be the right one.

There is an Ockhamesque beautiful simplicity about Matt Robinson's new Washington Monthly piece The Low Information Trap in which he shows that the masses don't hold Trump's crimes and misdemeanours against Trump because they, these masses, consume no news and so don't know anything about their hero's reported crimes and sins.

"How in the name of all that is holy can Donald Trump - a man indicted on 91 felony counts - still be leading in polls? When things seem so obvious, how can voters be so oblivious?" Robinson marvels.

"There are plenty of theories," Robinson notes, "but there's something even simpler going on: Almost no one is paying attention."

"The share of Americans who say they are following any kind of news closely [has] dropped to just over one-third. And a segment of voters takes almost no notice of what's happening at all, particularly when it comes to politics. According to studies ... people spend as little as 10 minutes a week absorbing political news. That's 0.1 per cent of voters' time, about the same amount they spend brushing their teeth.

"High-information voters ... have a hard time fathoming just how much we stand out among Americans with our bizarrely high news intake ... the very narrow slice of Americans who qualify as high-information voters are major oddballs. [Meanwhile] the average voters are going to their jobs, they have to pick up their kids after school, there's life happening."

Yes, we the news lovers, the slaves to news, are from Mars, those who live newslessly are from Venus.

Even as your news-besotted columnist writes this (it is a Tuesday morning) the radio at my elbow is trilling the news that a date has been set (it is April 15) for Trump's hush-money trial.

The mountebank is charged that he falsified business records to hide a hush-money payment to a porn star so that she wouldn't speak up about his sexual encounter with her. What a difference there must be, in one's feelings about Trump, between knowing and not knowing that he is stained by matters of hush money and porn stars. To be ignorant of it is to believe that he is unstained, that he is a rose without a thorn.

The phenomenon of ignorance of the news is a nightmare for political campaigners of all kinds. On the eve of the vote on the Voice, amazed vox-popping reporters reported meeting people who were somehow unaware of their being a referendum happening let alone of what was to be voted about.

Then, what of the Canberra Liberals' policy (as October's ACT election looms) of making voters bitter, twisted and vengeful about the criminal costs of the government's fetishistic commitments to light rail?

MORE WARDEN:

The policy's success depends on voters following news on the issue. How galling for the Canberra Liberals to face the inconvenient truth that the eyes and ears of tens of thousands of news-ignoring Canberra voters will never be reached by Liberals' leader Elizabeth Lee's accusations.

"This Labor-Greens government," Ms Lee seethed to reporters, "has ripped millions out of hospitals, schools, public housing and policing to help pay [probably well over $3 billion] for the tram. As a result, we have the longest emergency department wait times in the country, a housing crisis, and the lowest number of police per capita of any state and territory."

At October's election there will be news-savvy voters from Mars who will have all this important information and opinion bubbling in their minds. But then as well there will be blissfully news-uncontaminated voters from Venus (and from Gungahlin and Tuggeranong) who know nothing about this characterisation of light rail as the Great Satan and so will have no reason to fear and loathe the re-election of a Labor-Greens government.

They, these Canberra Venusians, (perhaps not even having heard of Elizabeth Lee, not even knowing what sort of thing a Labor-Greens government is) will gambol to their polling places with the delicate bloom of their ignorance not tampered with, not molested by news.

And perhaps on election day, rubbing shoulders with these Venusians as we queue to vote, those of us who are high-information, news-feverish major oddballs will in our unhappy oddity secretly envy them their blooms, the bovine tranquillity of their newsless lives.