New research reveals that backing for the war in Iraq was always wobbly. The public wanted to show support for the troops, not the government
The Guardian
September 30, 2003
By Justin LewisRecent polls suggest that support for military action against Iraq has declined since the US-led forces took control. The Iraq war research group at Cardiff conducted a nationwide survey of more than 1,000 adults in order to explore what lies behind the shifting nature of public opinion towards the war, and to investigate attitudes towards the media coverage.
People have a tendency in surveys to reinvent past views to match their current thinking. Despite this, 46% of respondents claimed that they had changed their minds before, during or since the war. While 83% said they "supported allied forces" during the war, only 44% said they now support "the decision made by allied forces" to go to war with Iraq.
This would appear to be one of the most dramatic public opinion turnarounds in recent history. But pundits are wrong to assume a single reason for this -the survey revealed a number of different and sometimes contradictory movements in public attitudes.
We identified three main groups of "switchers". The largest - nearly 30% of the sample - consists of those who supported the war while it was happening, but did not support it either before or since. Of this group, 49% said they changed their minds temporarily because of the need to support the troops in wartime. The surge in support, in other words, was more about backing the troops than the policy.
The second largest group - 9% of the sample - supported the war before the conflict. They now oppose it, chiefly because of the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the lack of evidence for the need for war and a sense of being misled by the government.
The smallest group - 6% - has moved the other way; they did not support the war beforehand but do now. The main reason given is the benefit to Iraqis of regime change, echoing the government's line that, despite the controversy surrounding WMD, Iraq is better off without Saddam.
The overall picture is not promising for the government. Those now persuaded of the merits of the war are at least cancelled out by those who have withdrawn their support. And most of those who didn't support it beforehand no longer feel bound to support the troops, and have reverted to a sceptical stance.
Despite the recent row about the BBC's coverage, the survey suggests that the BBC is still widely regarded as having been the most trusted source of information during the war. When asked "Which media outlet gave the best, most informed coverage?", 47% chose BBC news - far and away the most popular choice, with more than four times the support for ITV news (10%). This contradicts much of the conventional wisdom that the BBC did not have "a good war". For BBC news to be chosen by nearly half the population in a multimedia environment after all the recent bad publicity suggests that its reputation has remarkable depth and breadth.
Among the also-rans, Sky news does well, chosen by 12.5%. The tabloid press is read by 45% of the survey but chosen as the best source by only 6%. And the internet is chosen by a measly 0.2%.
Despite the criticism of the BBC, the government might be surprised to learn that the BBC is rated the best news source by both supporters and opponents of the war. Those who preferred Sky, on the other hand, are three times more likely to be war supporters than war sceptics.
If we are seeing partisanship common in the press creeping into broadcasting, the study suggests that this is coming not from the BBC, but from Rupert Murdoch's Sky. While Murdoch's Sun has a different audience (more male, less upscale), its readers also have a conspicuously pro-war profile. Mirror readers in the survey are mostly in the anti-war camp, and even the pro-war Mail has more anti-war than pro-war readers - yet Sun readers who still support the war outnumber opponents by more than two to one.
Indeed, only 30% of Sun readers - who have been informed by a sustained anti-BBC campaign - said they felt the BBC coverage was "impartial and objective", compared to an average of 45%, making them more anti-BBC than any other newspaper readers.
It has been argued that the media should be patriotic rather than impartial in wartime. The survey suggests, however, that this is very much a minority view; 92% felt that "TV news should try to be objective and impartial when covering war", and only 5% disagreed - and this applied to both war supporters and opponents. And 88% thought the press should be objective and impartial (with, again, only 5% disagreeing); newspapers often purport to represent readers' views, but it may well be that they are often read in spite of their partisanship, rather than because of it.
War supporters also appear to have more faith in the information they receive than do opponents; 42% of supporters felt most information to be trustworthy, compared with only 28% of those with anti-war views. So while those on the pro-war side may have been much noisier in criticising the media, it is among war sceptics that these concerns are more widespread.
Finally, the survey indicates that the stereotyping of war opponents as young and middle class appears to be a myth. It found that supporters and opponents were fairly evenly spread by age and socio-economic class - although the most anti-war sections seem to be at the top and bottom ends of the scale. However, as other surveys have shown, there is a gender gap, with 57% of women now opposing the war, compared with 48% of men.
· Justin Lewis is professor of communication at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies. The Iraq war research group is a group of six academics within the department, also including Professor Terry Threadgold and Dr Rod Brookes
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003