Public opinion shifts towards war hawks

[Charles Brown]

You have to scrutinize the exact questions asked in the poll. The pollsters are expert at getting answer % 's they want by the form of the question. I heard one television report yesterday that said support for ground troops went up to 47 %. But they didn't say the majority don't support ground troops. In other words, the way the poll result is characterized by the news report is manipulative. Also, the question was something like "should the U.S. take action to end genocide in Kosovo ?" Not " Should the U.S. bomb Serbia  to protect Western military control of Europe and the region ?" This doesn't even get into how on any given poll, the pollster can easily bias the sample of people it polls in the direction of a hawkish sector of the population. There are no neutral controls or checks on the pollsters whatsoever.

Anybody who has studied bourgeois polling and news reports of them knows one must be very skeptical and critical before accepting the Big Brother/ mindcontrol reports of what is happening in the world and how public opinion is manipulated. This is especially true of war propoganda, which is more skewed and manipulative than most.

Uncritical acceptance of raw monopoly media reportage  polling data is akin to belieiving in Santa Claus.
The is a, b, c for any consumer of the U.S. monopoly media lie machine. See for example, _Inventing Reality_, by Micheal Parenti.

Charles Brown


>>> Jim heartfield <jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> 04/07/99 03:29AM >>>
In message <370AC572.C93E30EE at sprintmail.com>, Gar Lipow
<lipowg at sprintmail.com> writes
>Those who support NATO -- gleefully or reluctantly should be happy.
>According to the polls (for whatever they are worth) U.S. public
>opinion has shifted towards your side.  According to ABC/Washington
>Post poll 68% suppport the air strikes, and 55% percent support the
>use of ground troops. According to the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll
>62% support air strikes; 55% percent support ground troops; 73%
>support ground troops as a "last resort".

The opinion shift that Gar reports is mirrored here in the UK too.
However, I would take it with a pinch of salt. I can't remember a war
where the public were so disengaged from the political process. Even the
Gulf War came after a considerable preparation of public opinion. This
one has just come out of the blue for most people. My guess would be
that the polls register an acquiescence to the official viewpoint, but
no active enthusiasm. British polls on war often ask the question 'would
you be willing to die for your country?'. This is one percentage that
just keeps on going down, no matter how jingoistic the press.

-- 
Jim heartfield