BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. In recent days, the Bush administration has exerted itself, back-pedaling from pronouncements it made on the eve of war and beyond, related to the level of threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Part of the process has involved blaming the media, as when White House spokesman Scott McLellan said this week: [CLIP PLAYS]

SCOTT McLELLAN: I think some in the media have chosen to use the word "imminent." Those weren't word-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

REPORTER: The president--

SCOTT McLELLAN: -- those weren't words-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

REPORTER: --the president-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

SCOTT McLELLAN: --those were not words-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

REPORTER: -- [...?...] never used that word.

SCOTT McLELLAN: -- those were not words we used.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used it. So did McLellan's predecessor, Ari Fleischer. And actually, McLellan himself used it last February. True, the president didn't. But he did call it, among other things, a threat of "unique urgency," which sounds pretty imminent to me. There are many ways in which ideas ebb and flow in the ether of the media, and we asked Hendrick Hertzberg, editor and writer for the New Yorker and former speechwriter for President Carter, to help us go through them. Rick, welcome to the show.

HENDRICK HERTZBERG: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So I guess the most obvious way to remove ideas from the ether is to stop talking about them, and you pointed out in your article in the New Yorker recently that there were glaring omissions in the State of the Union speech.

HENDRICK HERTZBERG: Well, one of them, of course, was Mars, which had been the topic of the day the week previously. But when it became clear that the mission to Mars was a non-starter as far as public opinion was concerned, it was quickly dropped from the State of the Union. But of course there were plenty of other things that were dropped from the State of the Union too, or that never appeared. The environment, jobs, things like that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:The words we did hear, though, were pretty much related to national security. We heard "war" a dozen times, and derivatives of terror 20 times, you counted. Do you think this is an effective way of framing the debate and keeping control over the coverage?

HENDRICK HERTZBERG: Well, it's an effective way of trying. It's the only way they have of trying. They want to focus the public discussion from now through the election basically on two topics. One is the war on terror and national security, and the other is the tax cuts and the theory that they have stimulated the economy. These are pretty much all the administration wants to talk about, apart from social issues, like to the exclusion of all others -- probably gay marriage. That's the three-pronged rhetorical approach of the Bush campaign, judging from the State of the Union.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:What about changing vocabulary, playing with words, moving the goal posts. This week, for instance, weapons inspector David Kay resigned, saying that he didn't believe there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq now and perhaps never were. How has the administration dealt with that?

HENDRICK HERTZBERG: Well, one way is, as you say, by shifting vocabulary slightly. What was once an "immediate" threat is now described as having been a "gathering" threat. It's an interesting phrase. In a way, it recalls Winston Churchill's phrase, "a gathering storm" for the period before World War II. So a gathering threat is a threat that isn't quite a threat yet, and that is now how the administration is picturing Iraq as far as weapons of mass destruction are concerned. You might call it a "vapor" threat.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, Roget's Thesaurus defines "gathering" as a direct synonym of "imminent."

HENDRICK HERTZBERG:Well, in that case, it's even cleverer than I thought, because it seems to mean both at once, and that's the most valuable kind of word in politics.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:What about obfuscation, as in the president's State of the Union reference to "weapons of mass destruction program-related activities."

HENDRICK HERTZBERG: Yes. That's a remarkable addition to the language. It's a rhetorical dodge that was based simply on lifting a phrase directly from a David Kay report, so that it would be bullet-proof from criticism on the weapons of mass destruction front, but that's exactly the calculation Gore made when he talked about "no controlling legal authority." A bullet-proof legalism that's open to an awful lot of ridicule.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Rick, what's your take on loose cannons? I mean back in September of last year there was a furor over Vice President Cheney's statement claiming a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and he was fact-checked at the time and found to be wrong, and it seemed to be a dead and buried issue. And then last week, the vice president said this: [CLIP PLAYS]

RICHARD CHENEY: I continue to believe -- I think there's, there's overwhelming evidence that there was a connection between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:So what in your mind is a journalist to do? I mean when does an assertion that's been disproved stop being disproved and become currency again in a war of words?

HENDRICK HERTZBERG: A continual reminder that there are other views of this matter, including coming from the administration is pretty much all the press can do. At least that's all the news side of the press can do, and the press has been doing that. I don't think the press has made the mistake that it made during the Joe McCarthy era when McCarthy's statements were simply reported without any kind of independent check on them.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:But in McCarthy's day, he didn't have to contend with ubiquitous television. A statement made on television by a politician seems, at least, to trump any correctives that are offered in the pages of the nation's best newspapers.

HENDRICK HERTZBERG: Well, that will become increasingly less true as the political campaign continues. We've had now for the last couple of weeks for the first time since Bush was inaugurated voices of opposition to Bush prominent in the media, being heard regularly, and that's because of the Democratic primary campaign, and that's going to remain true at least through next November, and it changes the climate, and it changes the atmosphere in which the press operates.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Are you proposing that the best corrective is a perpetual election?

HENDRICK HERTZBERG:Well, we have a perpetual election in this country. But we do have a one-sided conservative echo chamber in the opinion media, on the electronic level anyway, in radio and cable and television. It's mostly dominated by conservative voices. So that, combined with the control of both houses of Congress and the presidency by conservative Republicans gives an impression of a kind of single voice coming out of Washington and the media, and that's why the election campaign, with this sudden emergence of Democrats criticizing the administration seems so startling and new and fresh and in-- to some people, encouraging.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Rick Hertzberg, thanks a lot.

HENDRICK HERTZBERG: My pleasure.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Rick Hertzberg is a former speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, and currently senior editor and staff writer at the New Yorker.

BOB GARFIELD:For most of the Bush presidency and especially since 9/11, the public has been eager to believe in the president, including his stated reasons for going to war in Iraq, and even when the central reason was proved to be largely groundless, a majority of the American people, polls show, still cling to it. Andrew Kohut is director of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, and he routinely takes the temperature of public opinion. He joins me now to discuss how and why certain beliefs persist in the public's mind and what it takes to dislodge them. Andy, welcome back to OTM.

ANDREW KOHUT: Happy to be with you.

BOB GARFIELD: Much has been made of the conspiracy theories that continue to proliferate in the Arab and Muslim world, for example that the United States was behind the attacks on 9/11 and so forth, and yet, two years after the 9/11 attacks, a Washington Post poll found that 69 percent of Americans believed it was likely that Saddam Hussein had a hand in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. [LAUGHTER] What does it take to get an idea like this lodged in the public consciousness? And what does it take to dislodge it?

ANDREW KOHUT: I don't know, but it ain't happening. The percentage of people who think that the Saddam capture will lead to finding weapons of mass destruction, for example, is as low as 34 percent. But as many as 56 percent said it will lead to a revelation about the linkage between Saddam and Al Qaeda. This is a notion that's fixed in the minds of many Americans. Saddam has been our enemy. Al Qaeda has become our enemy, and they both come from the same part of the world, and disconnecting them in the American mind is not easy.

BOB GARFIELD:Now the Pew Center makes a living keeping its finger on the pulse of what the American public thinks about the press and the press's relationship with the government. Is there anything else striking that you've found --any more misinformation or even disinformation that the public seems unwilling to let go of?

ANDREW KOHUT: Well there are a lot of things that the public believes that no amount of information from the press or political leaders can change. One notion is that our percentage of foreign aid is so much greater than other leading nations. Americans believe this, and when you tell people how little it actually is, it doesn't sink in!

BOB GARFIELD:I want to get back to the question of how these ideas get dislodged from the collective consciousness. Historically speaking, are there any assumptions that the American people have made -- maybe on the basis of bad information from the government or elsewhere that people just sort of change their minds on, and what does it take to get there?

ANDREW KOHUT: What it takes to get there, basically, is some event which says this is no longer the case or this is not the case. Let's take the example of the war in Vietnam. Support for the war in Vietnam, despite mounting casualties, remained pretty high through 1966, 1967 and into the first two months of 1968. Then came the Tet offensive, and all of a sudden we had a divided opinion on whether the war was the right thing to do, and then slowly the divided opinion was transformed into majority opposition. But it took two and a half years and many, many casualties and high costs to get the public to change its mind. It wasn't convinced. Tet convinced it.

BOB GARFIELD:Presidencies have been lost -- in fact, Bush presidencies have been lost -- when the public stops deciding to, you know, read the president's lips on an oft-stated promise. I guess the risk of finally losing credibility is politically and otherwise a very serious one.

ANDREW KOHUT: In January, a CBS/New York Times poll found that only 33 percent thought that the administration before the war was telling us what they really knew about weapons of mass destruction, down from 44 percent in November. And the percentage of people saying they were either hiding stuff or out and out lying has risen from 53 percent two months ago to 60 percent now. At this point, this credibility issue is not affecting support for the war. Right now people are saying they weren't telling us the truth; they were exaggerating. Only 21 percent think they were out and out lying. But still people think it was worth doing.

BOB GARFIELD: Do any of your data suggest or do you have a sense that some sort of tipping point is approaching?

ANDREW KOHUT:Well, we do in fact have 63 percent of people in a ABC survey at the end of the year saying we can justify this war even if we never find weapons of mass destruction. The tipping point, then, is not the absence of these weapons but potentially the casualties getting to such an extent and such a level that people say the costs are not worth the benefits. And right now the equation is the benefits are worth the costs.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, Andy, as always, thank you very much.

ANDREW KOHUT: Well, you're welcome, Bob.

BOB GARFIELD: Andrew Kohut is director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. [MUSIC]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up, Lord Hutton blames the BBC, and why our government's right to keep secrets may be based on a 50 year old fraud.

BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media, from NPR.