YOU GONNA BELIEVE THE PUNDITS OR YOUR LYIN' EYES?

Untethered to Reality (Michael Kinsley, June 20, 2003, The Washington Post)

According to a Harris poll out Wednesday, a majority of Americans still think the Bush administration was telling the truth before the war when it said it had hard evidence of WMD. A Knight Ridder poll released last weekend reports that a third of the populace believes the weapons have been discovered. A Fox News poll last week found that almost half of Americans believe that the administration was "intentionally misleading" about Iraq's weapons, but more than two-thirds think the war was justified anyway. A Gallup poll released Wednesday concludes that almost 9 out of 10 Americans still think Hussein had or was close to having WMD. [...]

The most striking thing about polls such as these isn't how many people believe or disbelieve some unproven factual assertion or prediction but how few give the only correct answer, which is "Don't know." In the Fox News poll, vast majorities expressed certitude one way or the other about the existence of WMD in Iraq, the likelihood of peace in the Middle East and so on. Those who voted "not sure" (an even more tempting cop-out than the pollsters' usual "don't know") rarely broke 20 percent and usually hovered around 10. Four-fifths or more were sure about everything.

As someone who manufactures opinions for a living, it is my job to be sure. And my standards for the ingredients of an opinion are necessarily low. There may be a few ancient pundits such as George Will who still follow the traditional guild practices: days in the library making notes on index cards, a half-dozen lunches at the club with key sources, an hour spent alone in silence with a martini and one's thoughts -- and only then does a perfectly modulated opinion take its lovely shape. Most of us have no time for that anymore. It's a quick surf around the 'Net, a flip of the coin and out pops an opinion, ready to go except perhaps for a bit of extra last-minute coarsening.

Still, even the most modern major generalist among the professional commentariat likes to have a little something in the way of knowledge as he or she scatters opinions like bird seed. The general public, or at least the part of it that deals with pollsters, is not so cowardly. Most people, it seems, will happily state a belief on a question of fact that nobody knows the answer to, then just as happily do a double back flip from that shaky platform into a pool of opinions about which they are "sure."

Pollsters themselves, and the media that report their findings deadpan, are partly responsible for this. Every news report about a poll result reinforces the impression that opinion untethered to reality is valid or even patriotic (and to be "not sure" is shameful). The modern pundit culture is also partly to blame, I suppose, with its emphasis on televised argumentation. Viewers do not always grasp the difference between low standards and no standards.

Given that Saddam Hussein acknowledged having WMD--at least chemicals and missiles--and is acknowledged to have used them in the Iran war, the first Gilf war and to suppress the Kurd uprising, the American people would have to deny reality in order to arrive at the level of doubt that Mr. Kinsley and his ilk now counsel. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 22, 2003 4:27 PM