This article details the appaling one sideness of the media’s coverage of the war and attempts to give some background history as to the media current strong antiwar disposition. While the whole article is worthy of a read, the part I found most interesting is:

Sociologist James D. Wright directly measured the impact of press coverage by comparing the support for the war among white people of various social classes who read newspapers and news magazines with the support found among those who did not look at these periodicals very much. By 1968, when most newsmagazines and newspapers had changed from supporting the war to opposing it, backing for the war collapsed among upper-middle-class readers of news stories, from about two-thirds who supported it in 1964 to about one-third who supported it in 1968. Strikingly, opinion did not shift much among working-class voters, no matter whether they read these press accounts or not. Affluent people who read the press apparently have more changeable opinions than ordinary folks. Public opinion may not have changed much, but elite opinion changed greatly.

It turns out that the group of people most sensitive to media themes is the affluent well educated. The extent of support they give for a war is determined primarily by whether media sources cover the war favorably or unfavorably.

The easy explanation is to argue that educated people are more open to ‘new evidence’ presented in updated news reports. This openness leads to a willingness to adopt a more realistic position in light of improved evidence. There is only one problem with this explanation, as the article argues, the ‘new evidence’ was at best biased towards an antiwar group and at worst completely made up, as was the case with Tet offensive. Furthermore, the current coverage in Iraq lacks practically any verisimilitude to the events on the ground. Thus one is forced into the argument that educated affluent people are more amenable to biased or fabricated evidence than common folk. While attending college I have thought on many occasions college seems to filter out all but the most credulous given how much crap they jam down your throat without justification, but I think it’s unfair to say that the educated affluent are less likely to challenge the status quo then the common folk.

But I don’t want to give the impression that those less amenable to the press are somehow more independent in their thinking. I simply believe they take their authoritative information from a different source. The most immediate source that I can think of is religion. If this analogy holds, then it’s fair to say that the on some level the educated elite believe the ‘evidence’ of the MSM in the same way that the religious faithful believe the teachings of their respective faith.

The development of an independent thinker eager to apply his hammer to all authoritative sources is disliked equally by all groups. His kind is not disproportionally represented in either the educated elite or the religious faithful because both groups requires a degree of credulousness that the independent thinker is unable to countenance for an extended period of time. Eventually his hammer must come out and in the wake of smashed conventions and fractured axioms he will be banished.

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