COLUMN LEFT : War Proves TV’s Value as Propaganda : A Denver survey finds serious news-watchers in the dark about facts but highly supportive.

This was a war fought, on the U.S. side, with the delirious support of the governed. All the polls show it. It was also been a war fought before a national audience--following every twist and turn on their TV sets, tuned to CNN or one of the network news programs. But it turns out that the more people watch the TV news, the less they know.

Between Feb. 2 and Feb. 4, just over two weeks into the war, a trio of academic researchers--Sut Jhally, Justin Lewis and Michael Morgan--supervised phone interviews with 250 randomly selected individuals in the Denver metropolitan area. Their objective: to discover what sort of job television had done in communicating the pertinent facts about the war and its origins.

The respondents certainly supported the war by a big majority, and they were avidly watching TV news. But after six months of this intensive TV news bombardment, a majority believed that the U.S. government had not appeased Iraq in advance of its Aug. 2 invasion (as in fact it had). Indeed, 74% believed wrongly that in advance of Iraq’s attack, the government had threatened to impose sanctions if it took place; 65% thought their government had vowed to support Kuwait with military force. In other words, most people had gathered from their TV watching that the Bush team had behaved with high moral principle at all times.

When Saddam Hussein called for “linkage,” two out of every three Americans--on the basis of this survey--duly scrutinized their TV news menu and answered, “Linkage to what?” Less than a third of the respondents were aware that Israel was illegally occupying territories in the West Bank and Lebanon and only 3% were aware that Lebanon is also being occupied by Syria.

There was a direct correlation between knowledge and opposition to the war. This is not to say that those against the war were right and those in favor wrong. The war supporters, on the evidence of the survey, simply knew less. They were twice as likely to maintain that Kuwait was a democracy, less than half as likely to know that prior to Aug. 2 the United States had been publicly nonchalant about a possible Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Only 2% of all respondents were able to identify Kuwait’s undercutting of the oil price as a reason for Iraq’s attack.

Of the light viewers, 16% thought that Kuwait was a democracy, 22% knew what the intifada is, and 40% were aware that Iraq’s was not the only occupation in the Middle East. Of the heavy viewers, 32% thought that Iraq was a democracy, 10% could identify the intifada, and 23% knew of Middle East occupations other than Iraq’s.

The only fact that the supporters of the war were more aware of was the name of the Patriot missile.

On the basis of the survey, it emerges that Americans are violently idealistic. They believe by a majority of 53% that the United States should intervene with military force to restore the sovereignty of any illegally occupied country. The only flaw, as we’ve seen, is that TV news does an exceptionally poor job telling them who exactly is doing the illegal occupying.

For those who suppose that it is the function of the mass media to provide information as the lifeblood of democracy, this is all gloomy news. For those who conclude that the real function of a state-influenced media is to engineer the consent of the governed, there’s nothing too surprising in the data here.

The President said on Jan. 16 that this time it would not be like Vietnam, and U.S. troops would not fight with “one hand tied behind their back.” No less than 79% of the respondents in the Denver survey approved of this sentiment. But why did so many people think the war against the Vietnamese had been thus hobbled? After all, 2 million Vietnamese got killed. In the survey, the median estimate of Vietnamese dead was 100,000, which is like estimating the victims of the Nazi genocide as 300,000 instead of 6 million.

Thus was the savage Vietnam War rewritten through a thousand TV news shows and Hollywood movies as an irresolute military campaign made impotent by an enemy within, the anti-war movement.

In sum, TV news mostly amplifies the government agenda and eradicates history where it is inconvenient. Thus now the majority can rejoice that a just war has been fought by a principled government, rather than confront the actual fact that disproportionate violence has unnecessarily been meted out according to colonialist precepts that would have been well understood by any imperial power a hundred years ago.