Conquering the minds, conquering Iraq: The social production of misinformation in the United States – a case study

Abstract

In the lead-up to the Iraq War, the Bush administration rallied the American public for war via claims that they held unassailable evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and through the insinuation that links existed between Iraq and al Qaeda, and Iraq and the 11 September 2001 attacks. Despite the introduction of compelling evidence that these claims were false, more than 18 months after the official end of the war half of the American population continued to believe that either weapons of mass destruction had been found or that Iraq possessed a developed program for creating them. The prevalence of these misperceptions suggests important questions: How and why could such a significant percentage of the population remain so misinformed? What was the social process leading to the widespread adoption of misinformation? And what were the political effects of these misperceptions? This article proposes an analytical model that outlines both the production of these misperceptions and their political ramifications. It argues that the misperceptions about the Iraq war were socially produced via a complex interaction between a variety of factors including: the general climate of fear in America in the post-9/11 era, Bush administration agenda-setting strategies, and brokering between the political and communication establishments.

Keywords:

• weapons of mass destruction
• misinformation
• agenda-setting
• framing
• political communication strategy

Notes

1 The authors would like to thank Benjamin Barber, Thomas Hollihan, and the anonymous iCS reviewers for their constructive and helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

2 All data used in our analysis are restricted to the period between September 2002 and November 2004. While the general evolution of public opinion concerning the war is an interesting topic of study, this article is limited to the study of how misperceptions about the war were produced and maintained in the 18-month period following the official conclusion of the war.

3 See, for instance: Clarke (2004) and Woodward (2004).

4 The polls contained slightly different wording. See Everts and Isernia (2005, p. 282) for the precise wording of each individual poll.

5 This percentage change closely mirrors overall increases in the percentage of the population who disapproved of George Bush's job performance. See http://www.pollingreport.com/BushJob1.htm for an aggregation of Bush job approval polls.

6 The proliferation of misinformation about the Iraq War has been counteracted to some extent by the use of new media, particularly Internet and community-based media, a subject that remains beyond the scope of our analysis. We have not included new media in our model because we find no evidence that they have altered the logic of public opinion formation, including the adoption of misperceptions, in the absence of the diffusion of their messages in the mainstream media.

7 We do not pretend to identify all potential sources of Bush Administration support in the aftermath of 9/11. It may well be, for instance, that patriotic feelings fueled a strong reaction to the attacks, which favored the president at a critical moment. We include this, and other factors, in the general political climate in the US, but we do not analyze them because our investigation focuses on the relationship between the political system and mass media.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amelia Arsenault

Amelia Arsenault is a doctoral student and the Wallis Annenberg Graduate Research Fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Communication.

Manuel Castells

Manuel Castells is Professor of Communication and Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the USC Annenberg School for Communication.