This story is from last year but it fits too well with the Bill O’Reilly video from yesterday. From an article written by Joe Keohane in the Boston Globe:

Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

This was exactly O’Reilly’s reaction to learning that we do know what causes the tides. I’m not sure if this has always been a big problem or if it’s getting worse but people seem to be so entrenched in their beliefs that, even when confronted with reality, they find a way to ignore it.