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BBC The Inquiry had an episode on why we don't care about facts recently. One of the interesting things that came up was that most people believe that they think like scientists, when in fact most of us think like lawyers; i.e. an idealised scientist looks at the facts and draws a conclusion wheras lawyers collect and arrange facts to support their desired conclusion.

They said that well educated people are actually worse for this, because they have the intellectual tools to collect evidence and construct arguments to support their conclusion!
So I think your selective evidence thing applys to us all to a greater or lesser degree.

One other thing they said was that you can 'innoculate' people against misinformation to an extent by presenting the arguments to them beforehand but without all the storytelling, drama and innuendo that usually comes with consiricy theories. I don't now how effective it is, but it's an interesting concept.