the study, which took place during October 2003, current or former government or military officials accounted for 76 percent of all 319 sources for news stories about Iraq that aired on network news channels. News sources A widely cited public opinion study documented a correlation between news source and certain misconceptions about the Iraq War. Conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes in October 2003, the poll asked Americans whether they believed statements about the Iraq War that were known to be false. Respondents were also asked for their primary news source: Fox News, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, "Print sources," or NPR. By cross-referencing the respondents to their primary news source, the study showed that more Fox News watchers held the misconceptions about the Iraq War. The director of Program on International Policy (PIPA), Stephen Kull, said, "While we cannot assert that these misconceptions created the support for going to war with Iraq, it does appear likely that support for the war would be substantially lower if fewer members of the public had these misperceptions." China In November 2018, Senator Chris Coons joined Senators Elizabeth Warren, Marco Rubio, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers in sending a letter to the Trump administration raising concerns about China's undue influence over US media outlets and academic institutions: "In American news outlets, Beijing has used financial ties to suppress negative information about the CCP. In the past four years, multiple media outlets with direct or indirect financial ties to China allegedly decided not to publish stories on wealth and corruption in the CCP. In one case, an editor resigned due to mounting self-censorship in the outlet's China coverage." Accusations between competitors Jonathan M. Ladd, who has conducted intensive studies of media trust and media bias, concluded that the primary cause of widespread popular belief in media bias is media telling their audience that other particular media are biased. People who are told that a medium is biased tend to believe that it is biased, and this belief is unrelated to whether that medium is actually biased or not. The only other factor with as strong an influence on belief that media is biased is extensive coverage of celebrities. A majority of people see such media as biased, while at the same time preferring media with extensive coverage of celebrities. Kenneth Kim, in Communication Research Reports, argued that the overriding cause of popular