Reply #73: It's the building of impressions.

[Writer]

It's cursory knowledge. You can't actually say why you believe something about a person in the news, but you just "know" it somehow. I remember Al Gore's speech during the run-up to the Iraq War. In that speech he discussed the impressions that the Bush administration used in order to link Hussein to Al Qaeda, etc. The Bush Admin. dismissed him as "irrelevant," of course, but the impression a politician or a celebrity builds with the public is far more important than anything factual.