Leftwing Media Bias Watch

Every Monday and Thursday the San Francisco Chronicle menaces its readers with a reality distortion vortex called "Ruth Rosen". In yesterday's column, Rosen fabricates a government disinformation scandal:

GIVE THE Bush administration credit for the way it sold this war. The opportunistic manipulation of our fears undermined common sense. Nearly half the country believes that Iraqi terrorists commandeered the planes that slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 (Knight Ridder poll, January).

There are several embedded assumptions here, among them:

1) Half the country believes that "Iraqi terrorists commandeered the planes..."
2) This is a false belief
3) Those who believe this do so because the Bush administration deliberately persuaded them to believe it.

It has been reasonably well-established that none of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqis. How do we know this? It is not because King Fahd of Saudi Arabia purchased airtime to tell us that 15 of the hijackers were his subjects. It is because the ... Bush administration revealed the identities and nationalities of the perpetrators. Does Rosen have any evidence (or even media quotes) to suggest that the administration is also telling people that there were Iraqis among the hijackers? I don't think she does.

Second, the Knight Ridder poll [large PDF] doesn't exactly reveal a belief that "Iraqi terrorists commandeered the planes...". It simply asked the more muted question: "As far as you know, how many of the September 11th terrorist hijackers were Iraqi citizens?" [pp. 85-86] The possible answers were: "Most of them", "Some of them", "Just one", "None" and "Don't Know". The preferred answers are "None" and "Don't Know". Although the best available evidence says "none", I am open to the possibility that not all of the hijackers identities have been confirmed beyond challenge. It's also excusable, I think, for the average person to answer "One" or "Some". We keep hearing about the 15 Saudis, but where were the other four from? Egypt? Yemen, UAE? I doubt it's all that hard to induce the average geographically challenged American to go along and agree that there were one or two Omanis, Iraqis or Slovenians in the group if that's the country the interviewer is asking about.

In fact, just about half the respondents answered that "Most", "Some" or "One" of the hijackers were Iraqi citizens, while 17% said "None" and 33% said "Don't Know". Yes, the percentage of the public that is underinformed is disappointingly high. But back to Rosen's insinuation that the Bush administration is responsible for this knowledge gap. Not only does she not have a smoking gun that the administration has tried to lead us astray on this, but the demographic breakdown of the responses dismantles her position. Whether broken down by gender, race, income or party, the ( Men / Whites / High earners / Republicans ) were more likely to answer correctly than the ( Women / Non-whites / Low earners / Democrats ) respectively.

In other words, the anti-Bush demographics were all more likely to believe that Iraqis were involved in the 9/11 attacks than were the pro-Bush, folks. So even if Rosen manages to produce evidence of the alleged disinformation campaign that none of the rest of us have seen, I'd be especially interested to hear her explain how Bush's propaganda was more effective at convincing his detractors than it was at persuading his own base. Beyond that, why would it be that those who are the least inclined to believe in a direct Iraqi role in 9/11 are also more persuaded by the administration's actual arguments for regime change? ( I would argue that it's because they're consistently on the right side of the Clue Gap, but I'd be curious to hear Rosen's explanation too).

Rosen makes up some more stuff:

The war was also sold as a cakewalk. Now, we're surprised by fierce military resistance. What did we expect?

What we expected was consistent with what the President told us on March 19 to expect:

America faces an enemy who has no regard for conventions of war or rules of morality... A campaign on the harsh terrain of a nation as large as California could be longer and more difficult than some predict. And helping Iraqis achieve a united, stable and free country will require our sustained commitment.

Again, look through the various administration statements over the last year and a half. I will buy a piece of cake for the first person (including Ruth Rosen) who brings to my attention any administration statement that suggests the war would be a piece of cake.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at March 28, 2003 08:17 AM