by Jesse Lee
With the capture of Saddam, some fervent war supporters have boldly posited that America is now soundly in favor of the administration's Iraq policy and that the coming election is all but determined. Richard Perle and David Frum have been making the rounds to support their new book (which argues for aggressive confrontation with North Korea, Iran, and Syria), and have boasted of "sweet vindication". Robert Kagan, neocon intellectual par excellance, went so far as to entitle his Washington Post column "Divided on the War? Not Really":
Clinton's pro-war statements shocked some, but she was only expressing the mainstream view. In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll taken over the weekend of Dec. 5-7 -- before Hussein's capture -- 59 percent of respondents said they believed it was "worth going to war" in Iraq; 39 percent said it was not.
Indeed, his numbers seem convincing- unless you compare them to another set of numbers. A PIPA/ Knowledge Networks poll studied "Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War" over several months and found that 60% of Americans believed one of the following:
The majority of people in the world favor the US having gone to war in Iraq. The US has found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The US has found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the Al Qaeda terrorist organization.
What is amazing here is not that 59% of America "supported" the war, but that the number of people supporting the war was actually less than the number of people who held mistaken beliefs. Any one of these reasons, were they true, would likely have sufficed to convert many outspoken anti-war advocates.
Truly, it opens the question as to whether there was any accurately informed support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The PIPA poll gives a partial answer by revealing that of those who held none of the three misconceptions, a mere 23% supported the war. But this does not even take into account other misperceptions, such as the even more prominent misapprehension that Hussein was involved in 9/11. It is entirely possible that the percentage of Americans who both support the President's handling of Iraq and have their facts straight is in the single digits.
The past week has seen some major chinks in the armor of the administration. The Carnegie Endowment felt confident enough to put it's credibility on the line in stating that Bush administration officials "systematically" misrepresented the danger of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. A Washington Post story made it all but official that there were no stockpiles of, nor production facilities for chemical or biological weapons, and that the nuclear program was at "less than zero". Colin Powell admitted that there was no solid evidence linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda, contradicting two years' worth of administration claims presenting a "close working relationship" as established fact. Literally hundreds of assertions made with unqualified certainty now appear to be certainly false.
But if the administration is responsible for misinforming the public, the media, as essentially the lone guardian against government manipulation of the public, also shares the responsibility for allowing it to happen. The freedom of the press as enshrined in the constitution is granted so that the press may fulfill an important role and responsibility in our democracy, namely to make sure that the populace is as well informed factually as possible. The PIPA poll points out that the television news audiences, particularly that of Fox News, were considerably worse informed than those listing print media as their prime source of information. Indeed, as "info-tainment" continues to evolve in pursuit of ratings, it may be a challenge to sustain an accurately informed public. More generally, though, here in the midst of the ever-vigilant "liberal media" assault, many of America's news sources seem frozen in the headlights, often appearing to pursue an ill-defined centrism rather than truth.
If Howard Dean wins the Democratic presidential bid, the 2004 election will consist of two candidates, one of which is actively accusing the other of lying the nation into war, undoubtedly citing the recent Carnegie report. The numbers make clear that the media have not successfully conveyed the facts thus far. This election year will be a second chance, since it will be up to the free press to make sense of what will likely be an epic "he said -she said" contest. If Americans enter the polls as ill-informed as they are now, there will be one unavoidable conclusion: the media will have failed.
Jesse Lee is a regular columnist for www.opednews.com and operates Common Sense, a biweekly newsletter designed for distribution by online readers in Bush Country. He co-operates the blog www.moneyjungle.org and is a founding contributor to the platform of 2020 Democrats. To comment on this column, or to receive Common Sense via email, contact Jesse at commonsense@opednews.com.
