Sunday, the Knight-Ridder chain of newspapers ran a story about the results of a survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes. The study itself is available from PIPA as a .pdf - here's the direct link

The Knight-Ridder article focused on the part of the report that begins on page 12 of the PDF. Unfortunately, those papers now ask you to register (free) before accessing their content - you may already have done so with one close to you, in which case you can search that paper's site, using the keyword "misconceptions". In the event, here's a link to one copy of the story, and here's a couple of quotes to whet the appetite:

A majority of Americans have held at least one of three mistaken impressions about the U.S.-led war in Iraq, according to a study released last week.

The three common mistaken impressions are that:

• U.S. forces found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

• There is clear evidence that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein worked closely with the Sept. 11 terrorists.

• People in foreign countries generally either backed the U.S.-led war or were evenly split between supporting and opposing it.

The analysis released Thursday also correlated the misperceptions with the primary news source of the mistaken respondents.

For example, 80 percent of those who said they relied on Fox News and 71 percent of those who said they relied on CBS believed at least one of the three misperceptions.

The comparable figures were 47 percent for those who said they relied most on newspapers and magazines and 23 percent for those who said they relied on PBS or National Public Radio.

I find myself wondering whether the correlation is an artifact of editorial decisions made by those various media outlets, or an indication of the relative cognitive abilities of their audiences. Either way, the results are interesting.