Paging the media: We need another legend

Powerline blog points out a Washington Post story about a recent Harris poll that found roughly 50 percent of Americans currently believe that Iraq had WMD.

Half of Americans now say Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the United States invaded in 2003--up from 36 percent last year, a Harris poll finds. Pollsters deemed the increase both "substantial" and "surprising" in light of persistent press reports to the contrary in recent years.
(Washington Post)

The poll was conducted after Republican lawmakers Rick Santorum and Pete Hoekstra pushed for the release of documents showing that chemical munitions--probably from the Gulf
War era--were found in Iraq after the invasion, but the pollsters apparently did not speculate as to why the numbers increased.

We might expect the old media to start interviewing experts who explain to us how the Bush administration continues using "Iraq" and "WMD" in proximity to one another during speeches, though in this case the WaPo has accurately noted the coincidence involving the release of documents showing that Iraq did, in fact, possess WMDs. I credit Noam Chomsky with creating a cottage industry for conspiracy theorists. They look at the relationship between the capitalist free press and the government and see the government pulling the media's strings in order to manipulate public opinion.
The government can certainly influence public opinion via its statements, but it's not mind-control. It should shock us if speeches and the like did not have any effect on public opinion, on the other hand.

I can hardly wait for the PIPA followup poll intended to atone for laughable (.pdf) one that they produced in 2003.
Apparently they misperceived the misperceptions.