Speaking of things the public "knows" that aren't true …
One of my personal bugbears — and one of the first things I posted about — is the vast gulf between perception and reality when it comes to foreign aid.
Over the past 10 years, polls have consistently shown that Americans vastly overestimate the percentage of the federal budget that goes to foreign aid. People seem to think that about a fifth of all federal spending goes to official development assistance to the world's poor and hungry. The chart rounds up a bit, showing the actual share of the federal budget as 1 percent.
What's interesting here — as anti-hunger groups like Bread for the World never tire of pointing out — is that Americans also state a preference for a level of foreign aid that's about 10 times higher than America's current level of giving/investment. This means, at least in theory, that increasing America's "official development assistance" (in U.N.-speak) is politically feasible.
But look at this chart again with the eyes of a newspaper editor or a TV news producer, with the eyes of someone responsible for informing the public, for telling the truth and correcting misperceptions. This chart — like the Harris poll discussed below — should tell you that you haven't been living up to those responsibilities. It should tell you that you have, in fact, been failing miserably.
Such dramatic failures call for a dramatic response. If I ran the zoo, here's what I'd do:
For a full week, and absent any specific proximate news hook, I would run giant, A1-above-the-fold, second-coming headlines correcting some of these more common and egregious public misperceptions.
Things like, "Saddam, 9/11 not connected."
There wouldn't be any article attached to this headline, only a brief, somewhat chastening, somewhat apologetic, reader or deck saying something like: "No, really. The war in Iraq has no direct connection to the attacks on America of Sept. 11, 2001. Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida are unrelated evils. Yet polls consistently show that nearly half of all Americans believe in such a connection. That the public is so deeply confused and misinformed on such basic matters represents a failure on the part of this news organization, for which we apologize."
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In