Media

I can barely count the number of times I or someone else posted a comment to the effect of: "It's SATIRE!" after an OP, in a state of high dudgeon, posted something from the Onion or one of the lesser satire sites assuming it to be true. There's this thing called confirmation bias - because of it, people tend to assume something outrageous and awful about someone they don't like must be true. Confirmation bias can bite anybody in the butt, not just right-wingers.