This piece in the WAPO decribes how fighting political rumors only makes them worse and how correcting misinformation can increase its power.
Certainly a predisposition to buy into bad information does increases the odds that a person will keep believing it. As John Henry Newman once said, "men go by their sympathies, not by argument".
But even impartial information has to be received from an impartial source in order to be credible. Otherwise how will you know it's impartial? Conservatives perceive liberal bias more than liberals perceive conservative bias and have a right to be skeptical, if not quite to the point of using the source as a contrary indicator. In a July 2003 survey, a Pew study found that twice as many Americans (51 percent) believed news organizations have a liberal bias than a conservative bias (26 percent).
And the article above, from a Washington Post staff writer, relies on the work of political scientist Brendan Nyhan. A quick check of Nyhan's website reveals that he "co-edited Spinsanity, a non-partisan watchdog of political spin that was syndicated in Salon in 2002 and the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2004."
Call me cynical, but I have a predispostion to not accept self-described "non-partisan" labels from a writer that is syndicated by Salon and Philadelphia Inquirer. Salon's focus is liberal politics (if you want to trust Wikipedia), and the Inqurier not only endorsed Gore and Kerry but Sen. Arlen Specter with the admission that "preserving the legality of abortion plays no small part in this decision." In other words, save Roe v. Wade and vote Republican this time!
I think ultimately the key to fighting untruths coming from either a conservative or liberal source depends to a great extent on the self-policing of the community itself. Sadly, for Sarah Palin to NOT be perceived as some sort of Amazonian monster by the left is for the Daily Kos and the Washington Post to refute the charge. Similarly, it's more helpful to hear that Obama is not a Muslim from Michael Savage and the Washington Times.
You can say that self-policing doesn't work but this is the same as it ever was. To quote Newman again: "Quarry rock with razors, or moor a vessel with a thread of silk, then you may hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and pride of man...It is as absurd to argue men, as to torture them, into believing."
UPDATE/CORRECTION: I emailed the author of the study, Brendan Nyhan, and he said that they did attempt to vary the source:
"We then tried varying the source for both of the reasons you identify. Surprisingly, we found it didn't make much difference whether we attributed the articles to Fox News or the New York Times in the second round of experiments, although it's possible that our source manipulation was too subtle."
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