The Trayvon Martin George Zimmerman Media Disinformation Campaign

Article

Social science research offers some useful insights into how people typically make decisions:

•Reasoning is only a small part of forming opinions or judgments
•Judgments are often based on inadequate information
•Early and negative information has a disproportionally heavy impact
•Anecdotal, easy-to-remember information is also overly weighted

Therefore, disinformation campaigns use simple, powerful, negative, emotional arguments that tell a story.  Since people resist changing their minds about emotionally loaded topics, the media campaign has to ramp up quickly, before the facts have a chance to catch up to the narrative.