I’m grateful to Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith at Politico for putting me onto this video.

Yesterday’s Washington Post carried a piece by Shankar Vedantem reporting on some recent research into the power of political 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.

It’s worth reading — I find myself wanting to see the whole study. And I also find myself wondering what it says about a democratic system such as ours that people not may not take the trouble to become informed about the facts of a matter, but may actually prefer to be misinformed.