WSJ.com: Most Americans Believe Iran Is Building a Nuclear Weapon.
My headline for the story might be, “So what do you expect?” The Wall Street Journal reports the results of a Harris Interactive poll finding that “a large majority of Americans believe Iran is using its uranium research program to build a nuclear weapon.” Is that belief a surprise, considering the fact this is precisely the message that government and media are giving citizens, readers, viewers and listeners every time the subject of Iran comes up?
Let’s take a look at what Harris Interactive said Americans believed about Iraq in March 2003: Among other findings reported on March 6 of that year — 13 days before the war began — Harris reported 80 percent of Americans “believe Iraq has or is making nuclear, chemical or biological weapons”; 78 percent believed “believe there is at least some link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.” Lost in the mists of time is the finding that, even with those beliefs about Saddam and Iraq, only a plurality of Americans (45-36 percent) said they favored an attack at the time.
The point of all the above being: If people are bombarded day and night by the same set of “facts,” that’s bound to affect their thinking.