Over on Clive Davis’s blog, I suggested, obliquely, that choosing a strictly vegan (”Morning Edition” is your only source of “news) or strictly red meat (Bill O’Reilly is your god) media diet isn’t necessarily the best way to inform yourself.

Now, an experiment run by the Washington Post and Stanford University indicates—surprise, surprise—that people tend to seek out the kind of news they want to hear.

The Experiment: The Fox Effect II

We experiment. You decide: Do people apply a political litmus test to the news?

Yes, suggest the results of the latest online experiment by The Washington Post, washingtonpost.com and Stanford University’s political communication lab.

The test found Republicans preferred to get their news from Fox — even when the news stories were about subjects far removed from politics, such as sports or travel.

On the other hand, Democrats avoided Fox when it came to political news and preferred National Public Radio and CNN. And when the news focused on controversial issues such as the Iraq war and politics, “partisans are especially likely to screen out sources they consider opposed to their political views,” said Stanford professor Shanto Iyengar, director of the communication lab….

The results found strong evidence that people apply a political litmus test to the news, avoiding sources they view as unfriendly while seeking out compatible sources, a finding confirmed by researchers at Polimetrix in a national study with a representative sample of adults done in cooperation with the Stanford lab.

Read a complete analysis of the results of the latest Post-Stanford experiment.

Anyone who thinks that PR is the spawn of the devil should skip to the next post, because this is where I talk about the selling of ideas—something I believe to be absolutely critical in our battle against jihadism and Islamist totalitarianism.

Excellent point from Arianna, even though the information war she wants to conduct is against the Republicans:

Why are the bad guys so much better at naming things? Especially legislation. Especially bad legislation.

No Child Left Behind. Healthy Forests. Clear Skies. The PATRIOT Act.

They have a special gift for coming up with monikers that are easy to remember and easy to get behind. Sure, they’re deceptive, but they’re also very effective….

I say it’s the crummy name. It’s marketing death. No wonder the issue has yet to capture the public imagination.

Entrepreneur and marketing guru Seth Godin made a similar point earlier this year when talking about the failure of the anti-global warming movement to get traction:

Global is good.
Warm is good.
Even greenhouses are good places.

How can “global warming” be bad?

I don’t agree with Godin entirely (read this post about the role or human inertia when it comes to confronting looming “catastrophes” that we can’t see), but I do agree that he’s on to something with this:

Doesn’t matter what you market. Human beings want:
totems and icons
meters (put a real-time mpg or co2 meter in every car and watch what happens)
fashion
stories
and
pictures

95% of the new ideas that don’t spread–even though their founders and fans believe they should–fail because of the list above.

updated to add link, and make a clarification

from Reuters :

Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, speaking at the 100th-anniversary gala of the American Jewish Committee, presented a united front on Hamas and Iran — both of which have refused to recognize Israel….

“America’s commitment to Israel’s security is strong, enduring and unshakable,” Bush said.

“Hamas has made it clear that they do not acknowledge the right of Israel to exist, and I made it clear that so long as that’s their policy we will have no contact with the leaders of Hamas,” he said to applause….

Bush and Merkel criticized Iran’s stance on Israel. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said the Jewish state should be “wiped off the map.”

“Nobody can call into question Israel’s right to exist. Therefore, for any German government it is unbearable and unacceptable when the Iranian president questions this very right,” Merkel said.

The American and German leaders, who discussed Iran’s nuclear ambitions at the White House on Wednesday, stressed again they would work to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon.

Andrew Sullivan links to this note at Tapped, which points to a new online brawl.

This time the target is Ken Pollack, author of the influential 2002 book The Threatening Storm, which described the threat from Saddam. For what it’s worth, Pollack did not recommend the invasion in 2003. He wrote that there most definitely was a threat, and described it in painstaking detail. Pollack made no recommendations about when or if we should depose Saddam. Nevertheless, his arguments persuaded a lot of people to support “Bush’s war.” I’m thinking particularly of David Remnick, who wrote in the February 3, 2003 issue of the New Yorker [emphases mine]:

As it happens, the most comprehensive and convincing case for the use of force in Iraq has been made by a government intellectual, Kenneth M. Pollack. From 1995 to 1996 and from 1999 to 2001, Pollack served in the Clinton Administration as director for Gulf affairs at the National Security Council; before that, he was a military analyst of the Persian Gulf region for the C.I.A. More effectively than Dick Cheney or Paul Wolfowitz or any other of the hawkish big thinkers in the Administration, Pollack, in his book “The Threatening Storm,” presents in almost rueful terms the myriad reasons that an aggressive policy toward Iraq now is the least bad of our alternatives. As Bush did at the U.N., Pollack carefully describes the Stalinist character of Saddam’s state: the pervasive use of torture to terrorize and subdue the citizenry and insure the loyalty of the Army and the security apparatus; the acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing; the use of chemical weapons on neighbors and his own citizens; the sponsorship of terrorist groups; the refusal to relinquish weapons of mass destruction despite the humanitarian and economic cost the Iraqis pay through international embargo. We are reminded, too, of Saddam’s vision of himself as the modern Saladin, the modern Nebuchadnezzar II, who (after massacring the Kurds, invading Kuwait, and attacking the marsh Arabs of the south) vows to “liberate” Jerusalem, vanquish the United States, and rule over a united Arab world. Saddam is not a man of empty promises. His territorial aggression is a matter of record, his nuclear ambitions are clear.

Unlike the President, Pollack dignifies all possible objections and what-ifs with answers. For example, he concedes that North Korea and Iran are, in some ways, even greater and more obvious threats than Iraq, but he carefully shows why the regional politics of northern Asia require a different tack and why Iran, with its more dynamic, grass-roots politics, is far likelier to undergo a homegrown revolution or reform than Iraq, where politics of any kind are not permitted.

The United States has been wrong, politically and morally, about Iraq more than once in the past; Washington has supported Saddam against Iran and overlooked some of his bloodiest adventures. The price of being wrong yet again could be incalculable. History will not easily excuse us if, by deciding not to decide, we defer a reckoning with an aggressive totalitarian leader who intends not only to develop weapons of mass destruction but also to use them.

Remnick recanted (I can’t find the link at the moment; when I do, I’ll update this). I offer his 2003 remarks partly to contrast them with Remnick’s current robotic anti-Bush talking points and nostalgia for the President Who Never Was (see this post) and also as background for the new (so far gentle) attack on Pollack’s credibility (from Philip Weiss).

Pollack doesn’t speak Persian; therefore he’s labeled as a suspect adviser about Iran:

This is one of the problems with our arrogant war policy. People who are experts on a place they’ve never been to. The intellectual equivalent of the smart bomb — you judge without ever having to hit the ground. Maybe we ought to do more to actually look around the countries we’re thinking of invading. Because, surprise, we might end up living there for a long time.

I’m not in a very good position to criticize, having thrown out the word “Stalinist” and then hit “send” over at Clive Davis’s blog (for which I have expressed my sincere regret). Still, the argument that Pollack was “wrong” about Iraq (so far unproved, as far as I’m concerned) and therefore we shouldn’t listen to him about Iran is a totalitarian-type guilt-by-association smear meant to shut down the argument.

We can’t really afford to devolve into this kind of know-nothingism.