The dangers of plumbing public view on Iraq war By Mark Jurkowitz, Globe Staff, 1/22/2003
It wasn't hard last weekend to find prominent media coverage of the protesters who had gathered in Washington to voice opposition to a war against Iraq. And on any given day, understandable attention is paid to the pronouncements of Bush administration officials who insist that Iraq must disarm or else.
But as the clock counts down to what many citizens now see as an inevitable conflict, the media is having a much more difficult time relaying how the great American middle - those somewhere in between peace activists and Donald Rumsfeld - feel about a showdown with Saddam Hussein.
And with good reason. Observers say the complex and ambivalent web of feelings surrounding the issue makes it a confusing and difficult story to report and tell.
''It's tough to write, because a substantial number of Americans feel conflicted,'' said John Gorman, president of Opinion Dynamics Corp., based in Cambridge, which conducts polls for Fox News. ''It's a conflicting mess of facts and emotions.''
''Too often, what we see are just the headlines `public supports' or `public opposes,''' said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. ''But it's a more nuanced story.''
Pew made headlines last week with a poll indicating that 76 percent of Americans supported force if inspectors found that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction.
But that was the only scenario in which most of the country supported an attack. Just 46 percent favored war if the inspectors concluded that Hussein doesn't have such weapons but that he could make them. The poll also found that 53 percent of Americans thought the president had not yet made the case for sending US troops into action. Forty-two percent disagreed.
''The public gives very qualified support for a war with Iraq, but George Bush has yet to close the deal with them,'' Kohut said.
That's one of a number of recent public-opinion surveys that send mixed messages about how a showdown with Iraq is playing in Peoria. An ABC News/Washington Post poll, released yesterday, found growing evidence of ''greater ambivalence about Bush's approach.''
Now, 50 percent approve of his handling of the Iraq situation, a drop of 8 points from mid-December. Meanwhile, a recent Opinion Dynamics study indicated that the public favored - by 67 percent to 25 percent - military action to remove Hussein. But ''when we've asked more nuanced questions,'' Gorman added, ''then it becomes more of a 45-to-45 proposition.''
Kathy Frankovic, director of surveys for CBS News, said that the roughly two-thirds of Americans who support the concept of removing Hussein by force is ''a number that hasn't changed in 10 years.''
When CBS dug deeper early this month, it found that 63 percent favored resolving the Iraq crisis through diplomatic means, compared with 29 percent who preferred military action.
''When you start asking nuanced questions, you get a very different picture than we saw after Sept. 11,'' when support for a military response was overwhelming, Frankovic added. ''Americans want partners; a majority would say they would like to wait for the UN to come along.''
The Gallup organization released a survey this month that reflects those sentiments. Asked what the United States should do if the inspectors found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, 23 percent opted for a unilateral invasion, 19 percent ruled out war, and 52 percent favored waiting for the evidence to surface. Summing up mainstream America's view of a conflict with Hussein, the Gallup Poll's editor in chief, Frank Newport, put it this way: ''I kind of trust Bush, but I would like to have some confirmation before I say `OK.'''
''Bush is really in trouble public opinion-wise if the public perceives he's moving unilaterally,'' Newport added.
According to pollsters and analysts, all those caveats complicate the journalistic task of trying to succinctly and clearly capture public opinion on the issue.
''I think this is a very squishy and difficult-to-get story,'' said Alex Jones, director of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. ''It's a range of opinions.''
''I would say a lot of stories dealing with public opinion and polling are tough. Journalists don't always do a good job,'' said Newport, adding that particularly on television, they ''need a dramatic, simplified'' headline. ''And they don't have long to explain it.''
But Frankovic noted that public opinion could become a much simpler story if hostilities begin. Recalling how Americans were divided about taking action in the buildup to Desert Storm in 1991, she said that once ''the bombs started dropping on Baghdad, [the doubters] started changing their minds quickly.''
Mark Jurkowitz's media column appears on Wednesdays. He can be reached at jurkowitz at globe.com.