10 Sep 2004
Skewed poll questions helped shape American bias against Saddam

This is actually kinda hopeful news:

Rather than showing a gullible public blindly accepting the rationales offered by an administration bent on war, our analysis reveals a self-correcting public that has grown ever more doubtful of Hussein's culpability since the 9/11 attacks.

If the American public can really look at issues this way, despite political scientists misgivings, then maybe there's hope for the Republic after all. But it still proves Mark Twain's famous dictum that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics.

Why were so many Americans, as early as the first anniversary of Sept. 11, convinced that Saddam Hussein was behind the terrorist attacks in the United States? Did their mistaken belief that the Iraqi dictator was responsible for the attacks result from the Bush administration's information campaign to convince the public to go to war in Iraq, or was something else at work? A new study -- the first to investigate U.S. public opinion about who was to blame for the Sept. 11 attacks -- finds that there was, indeed, ''something else.'' ''News coverage and presidential rhetoric may have replaced Osama with Saddam over time,'' write the authors of the study, ''but Saddam was on the short list of most-likely suspects from the beginning for most Americans.''

(link) [Science Blog]

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