Baghdad Urban Legends
How come so many people think weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, or that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11 attacks? Are the news media to blame?
By Lori Robertson Lori Robertson is AJR's managing editor.
Armed with at least the opportunity to have learned much about the war in Iraq--what with the months-long build-up, the up-close-and-embedded coverage, the pages upon pages of newsprint and hours upon hours of airtime--and prodded with multiple-choice and yes-or-no answers, the American public still fared poorly on current events polls.
The results from throughout this year suggest that a good portion of the public didn't do its homework. Polls have revealed people harbor a number of misconceptions or bits of false information about Iraq. For instance:
* In a January Knight Ridder poll, half of the respondents said that one or more of the 9/11 hijackers was an Iraqi.
* Fifty-three percent of respondents in an April CBS/New York Times poll said Saddam Hussein was "personally involved" in the 9/11 attacks.
* In May, a poll for the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland revealed that 34 percent of those surveyed believed weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, and 22 percent said Iraq had used chemical or biological weapons in the recent war.
* The next month, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found a similar result: Twenty-four percent said Iraq had used such weapons against American soldiers. (Six percent said the U.S. had used those weapons against the Iraqis.)
We could cite these statistics as more evidence that the American public doesn't care about what happens outside U.S. borders or isn't paying attention to the news. The funny thing is, people are paying attention. Or at least they say they are.
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Stephen Hess, for one, is not losing sleep over the public's lack of political acumen. "I don't want it to sound like I think Americans are dumbbells," says Hess, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a one-time White House speechwriter. But the U.S. is "simply the most apolitical country in the world." Ask people what's on their mind, says Hess, and they'll answer family, health, job, religion. Anything but politics or foreign affairs.
Most of those interviewed for this story agree that the public often is misinformed, particularly when it comes to international events. But some, like Michael Traugott, chair of the department of communication studies and professor of political science at the University of Michigan, say the current phenomenon is a little more disconcerting than similar findings in the past. The fact that weapons of mass destruction have not been used and yet people believe they have been is surprising, says Traugott. More surprising than, say, not being able to rattle off the names of foreign leaders.
Indeed, the last few decades are replete with examples of polls in which the public had plenty of opinions but was short on facts.
In March 1982, as a guerrilla war raged in El Salvador, a majority of those surveyed in a CBS News/ New York Times poll said the U.S. should stay out of the conflict, though the poll showed many respondents would have had difficulty pinpointing the country on a map. "[H]alf the respondents said they believed that Soviet or Cuban troops were present in El Salvador, helping the insurgents, although there have been no news reports to that effect," wrote the Times.
In a 1988 Gallup Poll, half of those polled correctly identified Nicaragua as the country in which the Sandinistas and contras were fighting. The other half either didn't know or offered guesses ranging from Honduras to Iran to Lebanon.
But such foreign happenings didn't stir up massive public interest. According to the Pew Research Center news interest index, 13 percent of the public was "very closely" following the fighting in Nicaragua in November 1989; 37 percent said the same of U.S. troops being sent to Bosnia in January 1996; even the war in Afghanistan garnered 50 percent interest or less over the course of the conflict.
The war in Iraq and the 1991 Persian Gulf War, however, often scored 60 percent to 67 percent on the index. That level of interest suggests there might be something more at work than the "Americans don't test well" excuse.
Traugott, coauthor of "Election Polls, the News Media & Democracy," says the reasons for a lack of knowledge are usually a low level of education and partisanship. With questions about the war in Iraq, there is plenty of evidence that bias influences people's answers.
The Program on International Policy Attitudes asks factual questions in its monthly polls. Those believing that the U.S. has found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had declined from 34 percent in May to 21 percent in July.
Among Republicans in the poll, says PIPA's Steven Kull, those who said they were closely following the news about Iraq were more apt to have these perceptions than those who weren't following the news closely. This "suggests that there's some kind of distorting process going on," he says. It's a distortion on two fronts: one being a personal bias that leads someone to reach conclusions that conform to that person's beliefs, and two, "some skewing in the way the information is being presented," he says.
PIPA further analyzed its data from this summer to see if there were relationships between people's beliefs and their main news sources. And it found some: Those who said they watched the Fox News Channel "very closely" were more likely to say evidence of WMD had been found or that people in the world favor the U.S. having gone to war with Iraq than those who watched Fox "not very closely" or "not closely at all." For CNN, the opposite was true--those watching the network very closely were less apt to have these misperceptions. There was little difference among the attention levels of NBC, ABC or CBS viewers.
When PIPA compared Republicans who supported the war, would vote for Bush in 2004 and listed Fox as their primary news source with Republicans who met the first two criteria but listed other news sources, it still found differences in beliefs. Loyal Fox viewers were more likely to have some misperceptions about Iraq.
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