We call the era we live in the “Information Age,” but looking at the data after last week’s presidential election, maybe we should start calling it the “Misinformation Age.”

I’m not talking about the much-ballyhooed “values voters,” those people who claimed “moral values” were the most important issues in casting their votes – more important than terrorism, Iraq or the economy. And while it is troubling that “moral values” seems to have come to mean “anti-choice, anti-gay” (while ignoring, for example, values like anti-war), that’s not the topic that concerns me most.

Personally, I don’t remember the part in the Bible where Jesus goes about turning over tables in the Temple of Married Homosexuals or smiting women who want abortions; somehow, I only remember the parts about loving thy neighbor and doing unto others. But before someone throws a book of Leviticus at me, I’ll leave biblical interpretation to the experts.

The truly disturbing trend to me is the level of misinformation upon which so many people seem to have voted, particularly some who supported the president. A recent survey shows that among President Bush’s supporters, almost 70 percent believe we’ve found clear evidence linking Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda (we haven’t). One in three believes weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq (they weren’t). And about one in four believes most of the world opinion supported our invasion (it didn’t).

What accounts for this great divide between reality and the misinformed? To paraphrase the president, why are so many people “misundereducated”?

Ironically, it’s the same tools that should be making us better informed. Today’s media consumer has countless options in cable, newspaper, book, radio, television, movie and, most importantly, Internet news sources. All these options should provide a greater diversity of views. But they don’t – and here’s why:

That diversity of views allows people to pick a few sources they’re comfortable with and block out the rest. They can limit themselves to ideas that support their own point of view. Liberals might check the Web sites of Al Franken or Michael Moore, while conservatives might flock to Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh. And then there’s political blogs – don’t even get me started on those.

It’s doubtful that people purposely ignore news and views that run counter to their own. It’s simply more comfortable to do so. How many John Kerry supporters were interested in a report critical of his Vietnam service? How many Bush supporters wanted to get to the bottom of his National Guard record? Just point and click, just change the channel, just close the book and it all goes away.

The point is, with all these options available, too many Americans – on both sides of the political aisle – are surrounding themselves only with information they want to see and not making the effort to seek out views that challenge their own.

A republic such as ours depends, for its health, on a well-informed electorate making well-informed decisions. These decisions depend on absorbing, analyzing and filtering a diversity of views. When partisan propaganda and spin begin to replace facts and evidence, when we ignore or angrily dismiss views with which we disagree, when we impose this bizarre, selective form of self-censorship on ourselves and misinformation prevails, our nation suffers – and so do we.

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.