Media Must Explain Lack of 9/11-Saddam Link

By: Greg Mitchell News Analysis

On this second anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, there is much to think about, especially in New York City under pure blue skies so cruelly reminiscent of that day. One of many things for the press to think about today is a simple fact: more than two-thirds of all Americans, two years after the tragedy, continue to think that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attack, despite the fact that no credible evidence has surfaced which links him to the crime (and even his indirect al Qaeda associations are unproven or marginal at best).

Now, how much can we blame the media for this woeful misinformation? It's not a minor question, since surveys also show that avenging the 9/11 attacks proved to be the single most important reason Americans backed President Bush in his war on Iraq earlier this year -- and continue to support our presence in that country.

Surely, the media is at least partly to blame, but how much? We all know that this link has also been forged by the White House and its allies. And let us not forget polls have always shown that a sizeable number of Americans will believe anything -- that Elvis is alive, for example, or that racial prejudice is dead. Still, this does not get the media off the hook.

The latest survey was released by the Washington Post a few days ago. It showed that 69% of its sample said they believe it is likely the Iraqi leader was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. A majority of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents believe this. An Associated Press account on this finding dryly noted, "The belief in the connection persists even though there has been no proof of a link between the two."

So not much has changed since earlier this year when polls found that most Americans believe one or more of the 9/11 hijackers hailed from Iraq, even though none of them did.

In follow-up interviews, Washington Post poll respondents were generally unsure why they believed Hussein was behind the Sept. 11 attacks, often describing it as stemming from news reports or their long-standing views of Hussein. For example, Peter Bankers, 59, a New York film publicist, said his belief that Hussein was behind the attacks "has probably been fed to me in some PR way," but he doesn't know how. "I think that the whole group of people, those with anti-American feelings, they all kind of cooperated with each other," he said.

Similarly, Kim Morrison, 32, a teacher from Plymouth, Ind., described her belief in Hussein's guilt as a "gut feeling" shaped by television. "From what we've heard from the media, it seems like what they feel is that Saddam and the whole al Qaeda thing are connected," she said.

I put no stock in non-scientific polls, such as the one AOL ran Wednesday night on this subject. Still it was interesting that at the time I voted on AOL, the Post's survey seemed to be holding up: about 40% felt it had been proven that Saddam was involved, another 35% thought it was likely and only 25% felt it unlikely.

Somehow the public doesn't have its facts down yet, and without blaming the media for everything, it is still worth pondering that surely it has done an inadequate job of illumination and education, a sentiment that E&P has been expressing since early spring. I saw a survey a few years ago that showed that 30% of Americans thought that it was the Russians who dropped the atomic bomb on Japan and another 20% thought the Japanese were the first to use the weapon. But that was a historical episode from more than half a century ago.