December 6, 2002
Pew Study: They Hate Us -- More
If you read the fine print you fine that the polls that tell us how popular George W. Bush are samples from a thousand or so people. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press just released the results of a a study called the Global Attitudes Project that interviewed 38,000 people in 44 countries, and it found that "while much of the world empathized with the United States after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, overall favorability ratings for the country have slipped significantly over the past two years." (see Seattle Pi or An Associated Press account in The Globe & Mail. See also the report in The International Herald Tribune.)Bush is reported to have blamed the trend on "propaganda machines" that cast the United States "in a bad light," and said, "We'll do everything we can to remind people that we've never been a nation of conquerors; we're a nation of liberators."
The opinion of America is especially abysmal in Muslim countries. Only 10 percent in Pakistan "approve," down from 23 percent two years ago. In Turkey the approval rating plunged from 52 percent to 30. In Indonesia from 75 to 61.
In Germany it went down from 78 percent to 61 percent. In Britain from 83 percent to 75 percent.
In Russia it went the other way. The favorable view of the United States went up from 37 percent to 61 percent.