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'Fahrenheit 9/11' Shifts Political Opinion by Few Degrees
PHILADELPHIA -- Michael Moore's movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, has attracted about as many people as Rush Limbaugh's radio broadcasts, but the election-year film appears to have changed few minds, according to the latest installment of the ongoing national survey conducted by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center.Forty-one percent of the Moore moviegoers said the picture made them think worse of George W. Bush, according to the survey, but that claim should be treated skeptically because three fifths of those people were Democrats to begin with. While a third of the independents who saw the movie said it made them think worse of Bush, they are much more liberal than independents generally and were three times more likely to back Al Gore than Bush in 2000. Only a handful of Republicans saw the movie -- too few for their attitudes to be measured with confidence. In all, about 8% of the public said they had watched Moore's movie, which is very critical of Bush. But the survey, which was conducted July 5 through July 25, also found that 7% of the public listen to Limbaugh, who is strongly supportive of Bush. "What Limbaugh and Moore have done is find the hard-core partisan audience," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the survey and the Annenberg Public Policy Center. "One-sided partisan communication tends to attract an audience of believers and reinforces their beliefs rather than change their minds. Even when such communication attracts people who know they will disagree but want to see what the other side is saying, it tends to reinforce their partisanship because they develop counter arguments." Talia Jomini, a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication who analyzed the data, said "the relative impact of Moore's movie compared to Limbaugh's radio broadcasts must be put into perspective. Limbaugh is on the air three hours a day, five days a week. Even if Moore's effort has the added impact of visual effects, it only lasts one hour and 56 minutes." Among the survey respondents, only about one quarter of 1% of all respondents said they both listened to Limbaugh and had seen Fahrenheit 9/11, Jomini noted. Darin Decator, a 35-year-old Michigan resident and a district executive for the Boy Scouts of America, was one of these individuals. When asked his opinions of Limbaugh and Moore, he said "neither really impressed me all that much." He was motivated to pay attention to both, he said, because "you need to listen to both sides to make a valid judgment. There are different sides to everything and there's a truth somewhere in the middle." Another frequent Limbaugh listener, a 37-year-old office worker from South Dakota, was particularly unimpressed with Moore's film. Although she said she went to the film knowing that it "was going to be one-sided," she wanted to "see it for myself, to make my own conclusions." Her disagreement with the film? Moore "would only show bits and pieces of the story -- his perspective seemed more like a spoof." While both of these respondents said that Moore's film represented a different perspective, neither found it persuasive. Limbaugh listeners had a positive outlook about the country's direction with nearly three-fourths (74%) believing it was generally going in the right direction. In contrast, 81% of Fahrenheit 9/11 viewers felt things in this country were seriously off on the wrong track. Limbaugh listeners tended to be older and to attend religious services more often compared to their Fahrenheit 9/11 counterparts. More females, blacks and Latinos made up the Fahrenheit 9/11 audience in comparison to the Limbaugh audience, the survey found.The Annenberg survey has been tracking the presidential campaign since Oct. 7; interviewing will continue until after Election Day.Visit www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org. "