I believe it is more subtle, it is the effect of intolerance, in general, on the education system, which appears most often from religious perspectives. This is multiplied by a generalized impressment of obedience to adults and authority in school aged children. Children are taught that certain thoughts and lines of reasoning are sinful to the degree they face damnation, which to many imaginative young minds equates to a terror brainwashing where they become afraid to think, crippling their critical analysis before it can develop. They are rendered old children with childlike understandings of life's unanswerable questions, which they get answered by their faith. They never develop working secondary considerations, and are gullible because of it. Such people are perfectly capable of becoming research scientists, doctors, even attorneys, because we have an incredible compartmentalism capability. As you point out they are incapable in interpreting media, and why would they? It's not their specialization. They can apply critical analysis and secondary considerations within their career, because it was hammered into them in that compartmentalization, but it is not innate to them, they are not natural critical thinkers. So politics using indirect language and wolf whistling Nazi signals is just right over their heads, they will argue with you how their candidate never says racist anything.