Poll or Propaganda?

Pace University's annual public opinion poll on New York City's news organizations makes for an amusing summer read for cynical beachgoers who want a good laugh. For starters, it says the New York Times has the highest credibility rating among print news sources (64%). Either the New Yorkers polled are extremely gullible, or the pollsters only surveyed Democrats. The Old Gray Lady has had a very bad year when it comes to credibility and last week's complete misread of the 9/11 commission report was just plain embarrassing. Suspicions arose that either the disgraced Jayson Blair had returned to the Times or the editors had given up all pretense of being a nonpartisan print newspaper. Consider the Times headline on Page 1 on June 17: "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie." The story began: "The staff of the commission investigating the September 11 attacks sharply contradicted one of President Bush's central justifications for the Iraq war, reporting on Wednesday that there did not appear to have been a 'collaborative relationship' between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein." While that headline and article brought joy to Bush haters, it wasn't enough for Times editors. On the editorial page, they took the attack even further. It called on the president to "apologize to the American people, who were led to believe something different." Since the Times distorted the 9/11 committee's report, it provoked titters across the Atlantic. Melanie Phillips, a London Daily Mail columnist, wrote: "There was a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda.... The only problem was that the press coverage was untrue.... As so often in the coverage of Iraq, those that make the [illogical] claim that there was no such contact and therefore no cause for war saw in this report only what they wanted to see." The Pace survey says New Yorkers score the Times tops in credibility, so no doubt they will remember that headline. When is a poll just propaganda? Just last Friday I received a call from the Hispanic Federation, which was conducting a survey of Hispanics in the New York area. I tried to cooperate as much as possible because I've never answered a political poll before, but the questions went on and on. I finally had to make my apologies and rang off. According to the methodology of the Pace survey, the poll was based on telephone interviews with 642 NYC residents. New York is a city of 8 million people, but 642 people who bothered staying on the phone long enough to take the poll constitute a valid sampling? Amazing. The truth is a good percentage of us do not trust the mainstream press or network television lately - especially Vietnam veterans. According to Jerry, an ex-Marine who lives on Staten Island, "it was the anti-war protesters and the media that lost the Vietnam War. Not the military." I met Jerry when the visiting Vietnam Wall came to South Beach last year. He and several other vets wore Operation Iraqi Freedom patches on their leather jackets and did not hide their disdain for journalists. "Did you know we won the Tet offensive in 1968? Bet you thought Vietnam was a lost cause after you saw all those dead soldiers on Channel 2? We beat them, but you'd never know it from TV." That was a long time ago, I told him. Wasn't it time to move on? He looked at me as if I was crazy. "Why? They're trying to do it all over again. Look at what you read in the papers about Iraq and on the network news. They're only reporting the bad, not the good. They're encouraging the enemy all over again. If it weren't for Fox News and the Internet, we'd probably lose this one, too." I remember 1968 and Jerry's right. For the longest time I was under the impression that we had lost the Tet offensive and I will never forget watching Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in the U.S.A., give an impassioned broadcast in which he said we were mired in a stalemate. He said "Who won and who lost in the great Tet offensive against the cities? I'm not sure. The Viet Cong did not win by a knockout, but neither did we. The referees of history may make it a draw." A draw? The final statistic tallied the Tet U.S. dead as 1,864.That was a terrible toll, but it should have been put in the context of the 45,000 enemy killed. The Cronkite broadcast did a great disservice to the valiant soldiers who repelled the enemy forces. In his "Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel," Bui Tin confirms that the North Vietnamese suffered a devastating defeat in the Tet offensive in 1968. But they had an ally in journalists who opposed the war and knew they could win on the home front. When David Letterman asked Michael Moore where he got his information for his "Fahrenheit 9/11," he answered the New York Times. The audience burst into laughter and Letterman couldn't keep a straight face. Moore asked, "What's so funny?" Bet he answered the Pace poll.