From the Heartland

By Stephen Earl Bennett

Last month’s column pointed to the disconnect between Americans’ reports of paying a great deal of attention to the situation in Iraq, the media’s steady drumbeat about U.S. casualties there, and the fact that only about half of the public has anything approaching an accurate assessment of U.S. military deaths since the conflict in Iraq began. The column ended by asking “What’s going on here?” It’s time to propose an answer.

Start with the fact that Americans’ knowledge of foreign affairs in general is abysmally low, and has been since at least the 1940s. In 1947, for example, Herbert Hyman and Paul Sheatsley published an article in Public Opinion Quarterly entitled “Some Reasons Why Information Campaigns Fail.” Drawing on a 1946 Gallup Poll that plumbed Americans’ knowledge and awareness of foreign affairs, Hyman and Sheatsley found that about a third of the public were “know nothings,” and levels of knowledge and awareness of the international arena were generally very low.

Little has changed since. In February 1994, for example, the Times Mirror Center for The People and The Press measured citizens’ knowledge of international affairs in eight western democracies: Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Mexico, Spain, and the United States. Despite their tremendous advantage in levels of educational attainment, Americans fared worse on this test of foreign affairs knowledge than citizens of every country but Spain.

Students of public opinion about foreign affairs, from Gabriel Almond and George Kennan in the 1950s, to Olé Holsti, Steven Kull, Clay Ramsay, and Evan Lewis recently, have drawn attention to Americans’ ignorance or at least misperceptions of the world beyond our shores. Evidently, not even war significantly enhances Americans’ knowledge of the international arena.

It isn’t surprising that Americans tend to be ignorant about foreign affairs. With just a few exceptions—the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and the end of the first Persian Gulf War—Americans have reported paying little attention to media stories about international affairs. In August, Michael J. Robinson reported that only the “on-going war in Iraq” and George Bush’s “plans for a troop surge” were followed “very closely” by as much as 40 percent of the U.S. public during 2007. Only 13 percent were similarly attentive to media stories about “US air strikes in Somalia,” and only 11 percent paid the same level of heed to media accounts of “Hezbollah violence in Lebanon.”

In April and May of 2002—not long after 9/11—the Pew Research Center reported that only 16 percent of the American public constituted the “core international news audience,” up only six percentage points from 2000. About half the public (49 percent) were “the occasional international news audience,” and one-third were the “disinterested international news audience.” Not surprisingly, perhaps, the “core international news audience” was more likely to be affluent, better educated, white, and male than the “disinterested international news audience.”

Given Americans’ proclivity for paying scant heed to news about foreign affairs—especially when the country is not involved—their low levels of knowledge about the same occasions no surprise. Even when the United States is involved in a situation abroad, Americans admit to the Pew Research Center that they “lack the background to follow international news.” (This was the subtitle of the Center’s report on its 2002 Media Consumption Poll.)

Okay, so Americans don’t know much about foreign affairs, even during wartime. So what? How does this explain the fact that only half the public has been able to make anything approaching an accurate estimate of U.S. military deaths “since the war in Iraq began”?

The answer is relatively straight-forward: It takes old knowledge to make sense of new information. In 1975, Philip Converse drew attention to this principle with a simple illustration. Imagine two citizens, Citizen A, disinterested in public affairs and innocent of information about the same, and Citizen B, a “political junkie” who is well informed about politics. Both overhear a news report of a statement by the secretary of state. To Citizen A, the report is all blather and, being meaningless, is quickly forgotten. For Citizen B, the secretary’s statement is comprehensible and filed away for future reference. In short order, Citizen A won’t be able to recollect what the secretary said, while Citizen B will have incorporated the statement into his or her battery of knowledge about the topic.

Now we’re prepared to understand why, despite substantial media coverage of U.S. casualties in Iraq and citizens’ reports of paying fairly close attention to the war, this important information is known to only about half the public. Perceptions of how many U.S. military personnel have died there significantly affect public opinion about what to do in Iraq. Nevertheless, it is essential to understand the public’s limited knowledge about that war, and why so many Americans have only a hazy assessment of a key facet of the conflict.

Stephen Earl Bennett is adjunct professor of political science at the University of Southern Indiana.

Readers who wish to respond to this or other articles appearing in Public Opinion Pros, or to contribute commentary of their own in 800 words or less, should consult our author submission guidelines and editorial policies under "Letters to the editor and op-ed articles." Op-ed submissions must be received at least two weeks before the first of the month for the issue in which they are to appear.