...it is "Trust no one."
Misinformation in TV Drama Can Gain Credibility
The “sleeper effect” — the notion we can hold onto a piece of information while gradually forgetting it came from an unreliable source — was first proposed in the late 1940s, and a meta-analysis in 2004 confirmed its validity. Importantly, Jenkins notes that in both his study (featuring misinformation conveyed in a fictional television program) and the 2007 paper (where a falsehood was presented as part of a written work of fiction), the size of this effect was greater than that found in the 2004 meta-analysis.
This suggests to him that delayed-message effects “may be larger and meaningfully different” in cases where the misinformation is presented in fictional form. In other words, we may be particularly susceptible to believing falsehoods originally conveyed to us through fiction, perhaps because the context — the TV episode or short story in question — is more likely to fall from our minds.
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