I can see that if a person has a strong belief in an ideology and they identify intimately with that ideology they’d be looking for evidence to reinforce their belief at every turn as an exercise in ego.

The odd thing is that conservatism and liberalism are not opposites—in their purest form a person can be both liberal and conservative at the same time. Those who are the most zealous in their partisanship are mainly just playing ego games IMO, though they might not even be aware of that.

They ought to redo the study and provide a category for “both liberal and conservative”. I’ll bet those folks would be more resistant to fake news.