New Harvard Reports Confirms -- "Negative Reports Increase Violence"

A report titled "Is There an 'Emboldenment' Effect? Evidence from the Insurgency in Iraq." by Radha Iyengar (Harvard Univ.), concludes that the reporting of negative comments or negative polls on the Iraqi war have a measurable "emboldening effect" on insurgents. Intense news media coverage in the United States of criticism about the war, or of polling about public opinion on the conflict, are followed by a quantifiable increases in the number of attacks on civilians and U.S. forces.

The report fines that the increase in attacks is most evident in those areas of Iraq that have better access to international news media, like Anbar province, where there is greater access to international news media, measured by the proportion of households with satellite TV, which increases the credibility of their findings.

"We find that in periods immediately after a spike in anti-resolve statements, the level of insurgent attacks increases," says the study.

In Iraqi provinces that were broadly comparable in social and economic terms, attacks increased between 7 percent and 10 percent following what the researchers call "high-mention weeks," like the two just before the November 2006 election.

Some such attacks will result from legitimate debates on the war, but clearly the numerous, baseless, attacks like those frequently made by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are causing needless injury and death to both Iraqi citizens and U.S. Soldiers.


Note: The author, Radha Iyengar, a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in health policy research at Harvard and Jonathan Monten of the Belfer Center at the university's Kennedy School of Government.

The research studied data about insurgent attacks and U.S. media coverage up to November 2007, tracking what they called "anti-resolve statements" by U.S. politicians and reports about American public opinion on the war and was published in March by the National Bureau of Economic Research.