How Our Media Choices Reinforce What We Believe

A comment posted in response to Wednesday's post on American Muslims pointed out that 60 percent of those surveyed said they didn't believe Arabs were involved in the Sept. 11 attack.

That's an interesting point to note from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press' report on American Muslims, which overall showed the group is mostly mainstream. I would like to venture the theory that part of the reason this belief persists is that we choose media that reinforces our personal beliefs about world events, whether right or wrong, and that helps us to continue to believe them even if they are disproved.

Many Arab-Americans watch Arab-language satellite channels that originate in the Middle East. These channels often interview politicians, religious leaders or commentators who promote the view that Arabs had nothing to do with the attack. That makes it easier not to believe that people from a similar background would commit such a horrendous act.

Or take another example -- the belief that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida were working together before the Sept. 11 attack and Iraq was involved in the attack.

These perceptions have been discounted by many sources: the CIA, the 9/11 Commission and declassified Defense Department documents to name three. Yet according to a poll taken in March 2006 by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, 49 percent of Americans still believed that Saddam's Iraq was involved in the attacks or gave substantial support to al-Qaida.

And the media connection? In a study in late 2003, the Maryland program found that media choices directly affected the way people viewed three myths about the Iraq war, including "There's clear evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein worked closely with the Sept. 11 terrorists."

Eighty percent of Fox News viewers were likely to hold one of the three incorrect beliefs identified in the study. Seventy-one percent of those who relied on CBS for news held a false impression, as did 61 percent of ABC's audience and 55 percent of NBC viewers. Fifty-five percent of CNN viewers and 47 percent of Americans who rely on the print media as their primary source of information also held at least one misperception. Twenty-three percent of the NPR/PBS audience held one of the three incorrect beliefs.

The report attributed the results to several factors. For instance, supporters of the war in Iraq were more likely to hold one of the misperceptions. So it would appear that many war supporters turned to Fox News, which had the highest percentage of viewers with misperceptions, to find support for their assumptions about Saddam and al-Qaida.

5:41 PM ET | 05-24-2007 | permalink