The Power of Political Misinformation

washingtonpost.com ^ | 9/15/2008 | Shankar Vedantam

[Bob Mc]

The Power of Political Misinformation

By Shankar Vedantam Monday, September 15, 2008; A06

Have you seen the photo of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin brandishing a rifle while wearing a U.S. flag bikini? Have you read the e-mail saying Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama was sworn into the U.S. Senate with his hand placed on the Koran? Both are fabricated -- and are among the hottest pieces of misinformation in circulation.

As the presidential campaign heats up, intense efforts are underway to debunk rumors and misinformation. Nearly all these efforts rest on the assumption that good information is the antidote to misinformation.

But a series of new experiments show that misinformation can exercise a ghostly influence on people's minds after it has been debunked -- even among people who recognize it as misinformation. In some cases, correcting misinformation serves to increase the power of bad information.

......l

[Bob Mc]

Your thoughts?

[FlingWingFlyer]

FReepers are dancing as fast as they can to debunk this garbage being thrown out there by the Soros kiddies! And they are doing a damn good job. IMHO.

[jeffc]

Well, before commenting, I’d need to see the bikini photo *he said, just before running for cover . . . *

[JimSEA]

misinformation can exercise a ghostly influence on people's minds after it has been debunked -- even among people who recognize it as misinformation

The Tsunami of negative falsehoods about Palin and McCain have now passed into the realm of "Conventional Wisdom" and they will live forever. Remember "Bush Lied us into the Iraq War"? The Democrats will hold hearings ant put Bush in Jail if they possibly can over that one. By October 15th, most voters will at least wonder if McCain takes Aricept just from a whispering campaign. The left gets away with it because the media and the left are one in the same.

[Missouri gal]

The premise is supposed to be that people inclined to a certain position will hold to it even after it is debunked. However, the given examples of conservative “errors” are that tax breaks don’t work, and that Sarah Palin “supported” the “Bridge to Nowhere,” when in fact, she changed her mind.

I am more inclined to believe that Democrats cling to myths more readily than Republicans, because their views have been formed by the major media propaganda, and are regularly reinforced by same. Republicans are people who doubt and question everything they hear from so-called media. If they don’t they are swept into the masses of the misinformed, which supports the Left because they don’t understand the issues. For example, the over-simplfied “liberal” position on homosexuality is that if you don’t support so-called “gay” “rights,” you are a repressive Neanderthal, when you may be a person who understands the horrific social destructiveness of fornication, especially if it is legitimized and protected by the state as if it were a sacred estate equal to the pillar of society, the family.

[o_zarkman44]

The Wa Post KNOWS misinformation. They flood the paper almost daily with lies, distortions, and slanted commentary.

Birds of a feather........

[Kay Ludlow]

Maybe the conservatives didn't change their position after the refutation on WMD and tax cuts increasing revenue because they were more well informed than the democrat authors of the study...

I read the Duerfler Report, and the contents don't match the ‘executive summary’ that went to the media. Knowing that, I would continue to believe what I believe even after being shown clips of ‘prominent officials’ saying there were no wmd. I doubt the authors of the study ever bothered to actually read the report, more likely they are among the kool-aid drinkers to whom it is self-evident that “Bush lied, people died”.

People in academia drive me crazy!!!

[FredZarguna]

The Washington Post would like you to believe that most of what you read is “untrustworthy” and they're right about that. The problem is, this is essentially a confidence game, wherein they think that by making this “revelation” you'll be inclined to regard them as one of the few trustworthy sources. This kind of thing has been going on since talk radio came to be seen as a threat, and became even more acute as the Internet began to erode whatever was left of the dinosaur media. Soon, they'll be out of business, the Internet will reign supreme, and we'll be reading stories about how you can't trust holograms, or telepathy, or whatever the next Big Thing is. The truth is that it's all baloney and there's no substitute for having and using your critical faculties.

I don't think 0bama is a Muslim, I never did, and I automatically discount the opinion of anybody who says he was or is one. He's something much worse than a Muslim: he's an opportunist who uses a fake religion (his fake Christianity) to advance his real religion: power over other human beings.