Report Card

"Aristotle was not Belgian, the principle of Buddhism is not 'every man for himself,' and the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up."

– Jamie Lee Curtis in "A Fish Called Wanda," by John Cleese

Via Cursor, I read the latest Harris poll on "Iraq, 9/11, al-Qaida and Weapons of Mass Destruction."

Polls like this one serve as a kind of report card for those of us in the news biz.* How well we are doing our job can be gauged with both positive and negative measures of what the public knows.

By positive measures, I mean attempts to learn how well we have conveyed certain basic facts. "Tonight Show" host Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" segments are an amusing, and depressing, example of one such measure. Leno doesn't ask tough questions. He asks people to name the vice president. Or a member of the Supreme Court. Or to list the countries/entities with which the United States is currently at war.** And many, many people are unable to answer these questions.

Watching "Jaywalking" is a deflating experience. Every day we write headlines — simple, declarative sentences in big, bold-faced type — containing the answers to these very questions. But apparently we're not getting through.

"Jaywalking" also demonstrates why newspapers follow a strict, take-nothing-for-granted-on-first-reference rule. This is why we write cutlines that say things like "President George W. Bush (left) …"

But even more damning than such positive measures are the negative ones, i.e., the many things the public "knows" that are not true. That's what this Harris poll reflects. If a handful of students fails a final exam, that probably indicates a failure on the part of those students. If the entire class fails the final, that probably reflects a failure on behalf of their teacher. This Harris poll, in other words, is more damning of those of us in the news biz than it is of the hoi polloi that Leno so enjoys holding up to ridicule.

Everyone in the news biz needs to account for results like the following, and to admit that they indicate a massive failure on our part:

More surprising perhaps are the large numbers (albeit not majorities) who believe the following claims not made by the president and which virtually no experts believe to be true:

— 47 percent believe that Saddam Hussein helped plan and support the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001 (up six percentage points from November).

— 44 percent actually believe that several of the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on September 11 were Iraqis (up significantly from 37 percent in November).

— 36 percent believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded (down slightly from 38 percent in November).

Another interesting finding is that only 46 percent believe that Saddam Hussein was prevented from developing weapons of mass destruction by the U.N. weapons inspectors, a fact which most reports now support.

If you were, say, the head sports editor for The Philadelphia Inquirer and poll results indicated that, say, 47 percent of your readers erroneously believed the Eagles won the Super Bowl, then you should probably consider tendering your resignation.

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* I'm a former news desk copy editor for the largest newspaper chain in America. My latest position is "new media content management editor" — essentially the same role, except pixels instead of ink.

** To be fair, this one's a trick question. The United States is currently engaged in three major conflicts: the occupation of Iraq, skirmishing with Taliban remnants and warlords in Afghanistan, and the vague GWOT. But I'm not even sure myself whether the U.S. is officially "at war" in any of these cases.