The Wall Street Journal discovers the emboldenment effect

Took about 2 weeks from when USA Today published essentially the same story and I shamelessly ripped it off from them, but better late than never, and I will now shamelessly steal from the Wall Street Journal.

Periods of 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 small but quantifiable increases in the number of attacks on civilians and U.S. forces in Iraq, according to a study by 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 increase in attacks is more pronounced in areas of Iraq that have better access to international news media, the authors conclude in a report titled "Is There an 'Emboldenment' Effect? Evidence from the Insurgency in Iraq."

Same thing I told you on March 13th except there is an actual link to the study in this article. Yay!!! /muted roar Because you know in my head there is a little stadium packed full of people cheering. I don't know if that should worry me or not.

Iraq, War