Sunday, March 23, 2008

Getting Duped

I was reading Scientific American MIND and ran across this article that I found interesting and I was able to find it online:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=getting-duped

However, I could not find the sidebar article online, which I thought included very interesting statistics. I will just retype it...

"Popular Delusions
According to polls conducted in 2003 and 2007, Americans held several misperceptions about the war in Iraq. For example:

* In March 2003, only 35 percent of Americans correctly perceived that most people in the world at large were opposed to the decision to go to war with Iraq.
* In May 2003, 22 percent of Americans said that Iraq had actually used chemical or biological weapons against US troops.
* In September 2003, 24 percent of Americans believed that the U.S. had found evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
* In 2007, 33 percent of Americans still believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.

The prevalence of such misconceptions varied according to respondents' favored news source, even among people who shared demographic traits such as education level and party identification. Among those who used Fox News as their primary news source, 80 percent held at least one such erroneous notion about the Iraq War. By comparison, 55 percent of CNN watchers, 47 percent of print newshounds and only 23 percent of the PBS-NPR audience believed in at least one such myth. We believe this shows that Fox News is relatively biased, creating false impressions about facts, and that PBS-NPR is less so, perhaps in part because of a difference in the prevalence of straw man and weak man arguments [see main article], although further research is needed to bear this out. -Y.R. and R.T. "

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Melody - Are you implying (well at least by means of this article) that Fox News may not be just reporting and then letting us decide? How can this be? Have all the Rush Limbaugh fans just been tricked into thinking this? What a travesty!

PS. Brennan wanted me to vote for the beard.

Matt

Anonymous said...

Great article.
If you mention 9/11, Osama bin Ladin, and Iraq/Saddam Hussein in the same sentence/breath, often enough, there must be a connection, right?
Question is, was it willful deception?
Uncle Wil

StuckeyBlog said...

I was wondering who was voting! :)
So glad to see that I'm in friendly company with the article.
Thanks for commenting!