Efforts by right-wingers in Congress and in the media to brand Democrats as favoring a "cut-and-run'" policy on the occupation of Iraq have received wide coverage in the past week, writes Greg
Mitchell in
Editor & Publisher. And while some pundits, and even reporters, have suggested this is working because Americans are not in favor of a "hasty" withdrawal, that conclusion "flies in
the face of surveys by all major polling firms, as
E&P has chronicled over the past two years." It's one thing when polls are "dismissed, ignored or twisted by political or media spymasters,"
he continues, "but when journalists in their news stories do it, it is downright misleading." Mitchell points to a story in
The New York Times that claims "some polls show a majority of
Americans continue to think that entering Iraq was a mistake." Not so, he says, when "the fact is, not 'some' polls, but virtually every major poll shows that Americans have long declared that going
to war against Iraq was a mistake."
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