Does the Bush base consist of stupid people? Is it the bottom 50% of American intellect?
Three Years After 9/11: More than 40% of Americans Still Think Saddam Did It
Media failure or willful public indifference to the truth? 'E & P' readers sound off and point fingers.
By Greg Mitchell
NEW YORK (September 10, 2004) -- The latest Newsweek poll, released this week, revealed that 42% of Americans continue to believe that Saddam Hussein's regime was "directly involved" in the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, despite all the evidence to the contrary. That's nearly as many as the 44% who disagree.
It seems to matter little that every official federal probe, most recently the much-lauded 9/11 Commission, has debunked this myth, in high-profile reports. Yet the percentage of Americans clinging to the Iraq connection has declined only slightly in the past year.
Two weeks ago, in a previous column, I explored findings from another poll that suggested that Americans remain "woefully uniformed or misinformed about certain key issues relating to the war." One survey result: 35% still believe that Iraq had stockpiles of WMD when the U.S. invaded.
I ended that column by asking readers to send along their thoughts on the following question: Does the media deserve blame for failing to educate the public, or do we need to accept the fact that "you can lead readers to the truth but you can't make them drink it"? Thanks for the many thoughtful replies, along with the usual hate mail (often from people claiming Saddam WAS behind 9/11).
Excerpts from some of the letters follow.
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How people accommodate new, even contradictory information is a fascinating field of study (at least to Bill Gates, among others, who are familiar with Baysean problem-solving). There seems to be resistance to incorporating new data into one's mind-set after an opinion has formed. And of course, old studies have shown we better remember info agreeing with our established opinions.
Roy Frisvold
Santa Fe, NM
Time was, when a reader could trust the press to actually do some research, ask some questions, check some facts, and report them in the same story as the person making the misstatements designed to mislead. How one hungers for a story that contains the words "The President's statements are contradicted by the record, which states..." or some variant thereof.
Yes, I feel the press could do more. Repeating what all the participants said isn't reporting; it's transcribing. Reporting, as I understand it, brings context and perspective, not necessarily partisan, but enough factual information to allow a reader to understand what's going on. The lackey role of the press is more properly understood in the context of media consolidation and all that it entails.
Steve Stein
Let us never underestimate the staying power of lies.
The press is shocked to learn that the viewing and reading public actually still believes what the press told them in 2002. And how did the White House promulgate its lies, except through a complicit press? From Fox News to The New York Times, virtually no one in the established media was willing to expend the time, energy or resources to do anything except provide a megaphone to the government's propagandists as they beat their drums and whipped the country into a war frenzy. Today, there is blood on all our hands.
David Crook
New York, N.Y.
Too much of our "news" is now Michael Jackson, Laci Peterson, and Janet Jackson's bared breast, which gives little time left for issues that really impact the daily lives of most readers or viewers. I thank God daily that I had a chance to work for an honorable publisher (Ed Harte of Harte-Hanks) who rewarded editors and reporters who made sure both sides of an issue were reported fairly and accurately and who rarely asked editors and reporters to scurry after stupid stories that did little to inform the public.
Darla Morgan
Austin, Texas
Studies indicate that roughly 70 per cent of the American public rely primarily on commercial television news programs for their picture of what is happening in the world. I'm certain that a poll carefully segregating newspaper readers from television viewers as their primarily source of news would produce telling differences in the level of understanding of complex issues. For the sake of an informed citizenry, not to mention their own survival, newspapers must begin devoting more attention to the serious deficiencies of American commercial broadcast journalism.
John Boyer
Media for America
Annandale, VA
According to Robert Cialdini's "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion," once a person makes up his/her mind, the person will stick to this decision even in the face of contradictory evidence. In other words, we want to always appear consistent. Therefore, confronted with the wrongness of our choice, we will think up reasons for why we made the decision if only to show that we are consistent. So even if newspapers hammer home the facts and a majority of the public read them daily, it is most likely that this information will not change the readers' opinions because they have already made up their minds. Consistency (not logic, reasoning and facts) rules the day.
Tied closely to this is that much of the time we have "identity conversations." We explain ourselves, justify ourselves, and defend our identity. So when our political views are challenged, we feel our identity (who we are and what we believe) is being challenged. If we read facts in the paper that counter our fundamental beliefs, we don't say, "Oh my God, I was mistaken all along. What a fool I have been!" Instead, we write a letter to the editor, defending our point of view and decrying the paper's mistaken reporting. That's human nature. It's who we are.
Barry Simon
No, "the media" isn't responsible for Americans not knowing the facts about our reasons for going to war with Iraq. The AMERICAN media is responsible. Sadly, that includes NPR and PBS, the two outlets that should present opposing views but can't because they, too, are beholden to corporate sponsors. Shortly after 9/11, I began to read international media. Through such online outlets as the Guardian, China Morning News, the Toronto Star, Australia's ABC, the BBC, and a host of others, I came to understand just what was going on. Would that every American had been lucky enough to have the time (and it takes lots of time) to delve more deeply into the situation.
Sherry Mahady
I attribute a lot of the fact that people are misinformed to the deliberately misleading statements of the administration. In many cases they lie by implication rather than explicitly, so the press has a tricky job: reporters can't say "Bush lied," because although his implications were clearly false, his statements are carefully worded for semi-plausible deniability. His spokespeople can claim they were misinterpreted.
However, this does not preclude pointing out the difference between what the administration says and what's actually the case. An inventive reporter or editor could easily come up with, for example, a table with administration statements in one column and verifiable facts in the other. But if they did so the Republican attack machine would be on top of them in minutes, and the Democrats would end up agreeing that they'd gone over the line. So who's going to take on such a load of complaints?
Chuck Dupree
Comedian Mike Warnke once said: "There's such a thing as being so open-minded your brain falls out."
Sean Shealy
Littleton, CO
You took on an interesting topic, but failed to identify the real problem with modern journalism that allows those public misconceptions to occur -- the ridiculous, long-discredited formula of "balance," whereby a journalist finds a fact, then looks for the "other side of the story." If journalists are obligated in every story aimed at debunking these myths to include a Bush administration comment strongly linking Saddam and Al Qaeda in the same breath, or pushing other long-disproven theories, then no, the public can never get past those perceptions. Journalists have to quit pandering to sources and start calling them on their fabrications and spin.
But it's time to move beyond complaining about the problem and to start promoting solutions that better enable democratic debate. Now is not the time for the industry to throw up its hands and sigh "what more could we do?" The print media must choose: will they be a democratic resource or merely a megaphone for power?
Scott Henson
Austin, TX
When I was a younger man, I embarked on a career in journalism because I thought most people in the field shared my principles of honesty and accuracy; as I've entered my 30s, I have come to question whether I made the right choice. At least now I know that I have to seek the truth through diligence and discerning analysis, instead of relying on just one source. Maybe the larger public is beginning to feel similarly.
Alan L. Paris
New York
{For Jon L. Albert, September 11, 2001, R.I.P.) |
