Today's New York Times reports on its front page the results of a New York Times/CBS News poll. The Times headline over the news article about the poll results is, "Survey Shows Doubts Stirring on Terror War."
Curious about this, Smartertimes.com checked the Web site of CBS News, the other news organization that sponsors the Times/CBS poll. CBS was this morning reporting the same poll results in a story that it runs under a headline that reads in part, "Support For War Effort Is Strong."
Hmm. If two news organizations can make such widely disparate interpretations of the same poll data, in a poll that they both sponsored, then the data must be really murky, one would think. Maybe support for the war is running at, say, 55% or has fallen from the early levels of 90% to a mere 60%. Nope. The poll reported today asked, among other questions, "Do you approve of the military attacks led by the United States against Afghanistan?" The survey, a telephone poll of 1024 U.S. adults, found 88% approved and 8% disapproved.
It's not just the headline in the Times that is skewed. Check out this sentence from the article: "In another sign of mounting uneasiness about the war, only 29 percent said they were very confident in the ability of the United States government to maintain the international alliance of countries that support the military campaign; two weeks ago, 46 percent were very confident."
The Times labels this "another sign of mounting uneasiness about the war," but it may be more accurate to label it a sign of mounting uneasiness with the multilateralism espoused by the New York Times editorialists. The poll doesn't ask people whether their support for American military action depends on whether foreign governments that were not attacked by terrorists on September 11 "support" the action; it's likely that Americans would support American retaliatory strikes even if they were unilateral and not conducted as part of an "international alliance." The shift in opinion on this question over the past two weeks is probably a healthy one, based on a more realistic assessment of the true nature of the regimes of our "friends" the Saudis and our "friends" the Pakistanis. It also may be based on comments like those of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, Mr. Wolfowitz was asked, "Is there a danger that, as it were, in the efforts to preserve the coalition that some of the objectives of the United States and Britain are being --" Mr. Wolfowitz responded, in part, "We don't talk about 'the' coalition. The secretary talks about 'coalitions' and I think that's the right way to think about it." So when the Times poll asked about "the international alliance," it was testing support for a concept that not even the U.S. secretary of defense supports. Would the New York Times interpret Mr. Wolfowitz's comment in Sunday's Telegraph as "another sign of mounting uneasiness about the war"? If the paper had noticed the comment, maybe it would have. After all, in a paper that runs a poll showing 88% approval of the war effort under the headline "Survey Shows Doubts Stirring On Terror War," anything is possible.
Senator McConnell: Senator McConnell of Kentucky has a wonderful letter to the editor of the New York Times this morning that the Times deserves at least some credit for printing. The Senator writes about the New York Times, "It has become difficult to take seriously an editorial page that argues that in the wake of attacks on our country, missile defense is less relevant while simultaneously arguing that campaign finance reform is 'more important than ever.'"