Reevaluating News and Opinion Dynamics in the Iraq War: New Evidence for Social Identification Effects

Abstract What causes changes in popular support for American wars? Competing theories posit that either the tone and content of wartime news or social identity cues conveyed through mass media should play the larger role. We offer new evidence in this debate by analyzing a novel set of rolling cross-sectional opinion data collected continuously over 13 months during an early phase of the Iraq War and pairing it with data on news intensity and the evaluative tone of news coverage during that same period. Contrary to conventional information updating explanations of war support but consistent with a social identification process, we find that greater intensity of wartime news coverage is associated with increases in aggregate support even after controlling for the evaluative tone of that news coverage.