You don’t have to be a news junkie reading four newspapers a day to understand the basics of what’s happened in the war against terrorism and the recent invasion of Iraq. But if one recent poll is any indication, we’ve still got a long way to go before we even get to “the basics.”
The Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland did a fairly extensive survey on public awareness and opinions on issues relating to Iraq, the attacks of 9/11, weapons of mass destruction, etc. The results were discouraging, to say the least.
* 41% said they believed the United States had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the invasion. Among those who approved of the decision to go to war, the percentage who believe we’ve found WMD is even higher — 52%.
* 55% of Republicans who claim to “follow international affairs very closely” believe we’ve found the WMD.
* 22% of all respondents not only believe that we’ve found WMD but that Iraq actually used chemical or biological weapons during the war.
* Half of those polled said Iraqis were among the 19 hijackers on 9/11. Only 17 percent correctly said that none of the hijackers was Iraqi.
Program director Steve Kull said the results were “striking.”
“Given the intensive news coverage and high levels of public attention, this level of misinformation suggests some Americans may be avoiding having an experience of cognitive dissonance,” Kull said.
I respect Kull’s work, but I think he’s off base in his explanation. He can’t imagine how so many Americans could be so wrong about the simplest truths, so Kull generously wants to chalk it up to “cognitive dissonance.” I come to a different conclusion: profound laziness.
The information is so easy to obtain, even from pseudo-news outlets like Fox News, that there’s no good excuse for such widespread ignorance. Americans aren’t fooling themselves into believing what will make them feel better, they’re drawing vague conclusions from newspapers they don’t read and news programs they don’t watch.
In the people’s defense, however, it probably doesn’t help when the public hears the President of the United States say things like “we found” WMD when we haven’t.
The public clearly has to do a better job of keeping informed — our democracy, after all, depends on it — but it’d also be helpful if the government, which the people want to trust, stopped manipulating public opinion with half-truths and scare tactics.