Tag Archives: disinformation

in the news a little

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I wrote a letter to the editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch after spending a day at the federal court house last week. Because I expected it would be printed in the paper, if published at all, and because I didn’t see it there, I thought it had failed of its aim. But I didn’t think of the online paper. Here’s my letter, and a couple of links here and here to local blogs that tell a good deal of the back story if you look around.

I blogged about the back story over a year ago. There’s a great deal I know about it that I can’t say, but I’m going to write about it again soon.

Dukakis replayed?

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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.