The Lies that Shape Us
In 2011, Newsweek ran a poll asking 1,000 Americans to take the U.S. citizenship test.
73% of them could not correctly identify why we fought the Cold War.
It could be argued that our ignorance of current affairs is rooted in our ignorance of history. If the vast majority of Americans have no idea why we fought the Cold War in the first place, they probably don't know that we spent that war funding the mujahideen in an effort to combat Soviet forces. Similarly, I doubt many Americans know that a plan for military "covert action" in Afghanistan was first proposed in January of 2001, months before September 11th. We Americans, as a whole, are uninformed or misinformed on a wide number of issues related to 9/11 and the "War on Terror". Robert Jensen puts it nicely in his piece September 11 Lessons: Combating Ignorance, Avoiding Arrogance :
"A Knight Ridder/Princeton Research poll conducted January 3-6, 2003, showed that 44 percent of the respondents thought that ''most'' or ''some'' of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis; only 17 percent knew the correct answer, ''none.'' Also in that poll, 65 percent said they thought Iraq and al-Qaeda were allies, and 91 percent believed that Hussein was concealing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Forty-one percent said Iraq already had nuclear weapons, a claim that not even Bush officials made.[1] That poll wasn't idiosyncratic. A Pew Research Center/Council on Foreign Relations survey conducted on February 12-13, 2003, found that 57 percent of Americans believed that weapons inspectors had proof that Iraq was trying to hide weapons of mass destruction (WMD) (which inspectors never said) and that 57 percent also believe Saddam Hussein had a direct role in helping the 9/11 hijackers.[2]
This ignorance matters. The Program on International Policy at the University of Maryland, based on polls conducted from June through September 2003,[3] found that 48 percent of the public believed that evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaeda had been found, 22 percent believed that WMD had been found and 25 percent believed that world public opinion had favored a US war with Iraq. Overall, 60 percent had at least one of those misperceptions, which were highly correlated with support for war. Of people who held none of those beliefs, only 23 percent supported war. With each misperception, support for the war increased:
1 misperception: 53 percent support for war.
2 misperceptions: 78 percent support for war.
3 misperceptions: 86 percent support for war."
So, when considering what Americans think about 9/11, its causes, and its consequences, it's important to realize that a) a large chunk of Americans are poorly informed, and b) the more poorly informed they are, the more likely they are to support US military action. Researchers saw a similar trend when they discovered that, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the less Americans knew about Ukraine's location, the more they wanted the US to militarily intervene.
Now that we've roughly established the level of misinformation that should be taken into account regarding American public opinion, we can start taking a look at those opinions.
From Gallup Polls:
Public support for both the Iraq War and the War in Afghanistan started out high and has gradually decreased ever since. Party affiliation also results in marked differences in level of initial support and the rate of change in approval over time.
In order to better understand these trends in public opinion, we need to take a look at broader trends in Americans' political parties and political ideologies.
In terms of political parties , America is divided into three main groups: the Democrats; the Republicans; and the Independents. We have seen a recent rise in people self-identifying as "Independents", with that label now accounting for 42% of the population.
Political ideologies are a bit more nuanced than political parties, as they fall along a spectrum rather than into a handful of mutually exclusive categories. Ideology is determined by asking participants a series of questions about their opinions on different policies, and ranking them based on the conservatism or liberalism of those policies. Those results are grouped here for ease of presentation, but the PEW study on political polarization I reference further down the page will give you a better idea of how ideology operates.
Political ideology is related to political party, since the majority of people lean towards the political party that best aligns with their beliefs. As can be seen below, the Republican party heavily favors conservatism, the Independents (and the American population as a whole) favor conservatism, and the Democrats favor liberalism.
These political demographics are key to understanding public opinion because they influence where American citizens get their news from. Earlier this year, PEW ran a study examining political polarization in America and included a section on the media habits of those involved, as compared to their political ideology. It showed that liberals received their news from a variety of news sources, and trusted the majority of the news sources provided, while the majority of conservatives used Fox News as their main news source and distrusted two thirds of the other news source options.
Now, Fox News drawing the largest conservative audience is not particularly surprising. As of 2015, Fox News has an average evening viewership of 1.8 million people - more than CNN and MSNBC combined.
The problem with the Fox News' popularity, particularly for its 60% conservative viewer base, is that the information it presents (rather, the information that has been reviewed by fact checkers) is factually incorrect 60% of the time. That isn't to say that liberals' news sources are perfect; CNN's statements ring false 27% of the time, and NBC's statements are false 41% of the time. However, the fact that Fox News has the highest cable viewership ratings in the nation, combined with the fact that such a high percent of the information it presents is false, likely contributes to the misperpections discussed in the University of Maryland study.
A closer look at the levels of news source trust reported in PEW’s study and the fact-checking data from Politifact reveals clear trends in news quality and political ideology across the board. The fact that every one of conservatives’ most-trusted news sources report fact-checked statements rated “mostly false” or below more than 50% of the time poses a challenge to opposite sides of the political spectrum forming opinions based on the same facts.
The University of Maryland study contains an entire section discussing the prevalence of of misperceptions in Republican participants, and devotes a subsection to those who watch Fox News. While "Republicans and those with lower education are more likely to have misperceptions", Republicans who watch Fox News were 11 points higher on the scale than the average. On the other hand, Republicans who turned to PBS or NPR were 11 points lower.
The other interesting trend for the "Fox Republicans" was what occurred when they paid more attention to the news:
“It would seem natural to assume that misperceptions are due to a failure to pay attention to news and that those who have greater exposure to news would have fewer misperceptions. This was indeed the case with those who primarily get their news from print media. However, for most media outlets, increased attention did not reduce the likelihood of misperceptions. Most striking, in the case of those who primarily watched Fox News, greater attention to news modestly increases the likelihood of misperceptions.”
The fact that the number of mispecerceptions increased as attention increased corroborates the low level of factual information present in Fox News' reporting. Due to Fox News' popularity, I believe that the scale of these "misperceptions" substantially impacts American public opinion. The relationship between the propagation of this flawed information and support for the war could partially account for the high levels of Republican support, as was shown in the WP-ABC polls.
To wrap things up, not very many Americans are aware of the historical context of 9/11, so it's unlikely that they take this context into consideration when forming opinions about the "War on Terror". In my experience, many people actively avoid or reject learning about the context of 9/11. People prefer to lean on their preferred news sources when forming opinions on public events, but the variable quality of these news sources can cause divides in public opinion because not everyone shares the same "facts". Public support for the wars was highest when they started and decreased over time, though these levels were likely buoyed by commonly-held false beliefs. Republicans have the highest levels of support for the war, from the beginning of the war onward, possibly because of the higher levels of misinformation their main news sources provide and the resulting "misperceptions", which correlate with an increased support for military action.
