Perhaps not since colonial Salem have fears of conspiracy been so pervasive. And though old women are no longer persecuted for dancing with the devil (we’re fairly sure), a new study shows that paranoid tendencies in American thinking are still strong. Only instead of wayward outsiders, would-be conspirators are seen at the heart of the establishment, engaged in covert operations against the public. According to the study, published in the summer issue of the Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly by Carl Stempel, Thomas Hargrove, and Guido H. Stempel III, more than a third (36 percent) of the Americans surveyed believe it somewhat credible or very credible that the Bush administration assisted in or intentionally refrained from preventing the 9/11 attacks so it could launch the country into a war in the Middle East.

Of the two other common conspiracy theories addressed in the July 2006 survey, few people bought into the notion that a U.S. missile and not a plane hit the Pentagon (12 percent of those surveyed in a national sample) or that secretly hidden explosives caused the Twin Towers to collapse after the planes hit them (16 percent).

The survey also found that regular consumers of “legitimate” media (daily newspapers, newspaper Web sites, radio, and network TV news) proved less likely to believe the conspiracy theories than people who have minimal media involvement. Those who consume “less legitimate” media, such as blogs and supermarket tabloids, are more likely to believe in at least one of the conspiracy theories than followers of “legitimate” media.

Conspiracy thinking, according to the study, comes decked out in the red and blue of political partisanship. Although Republicans are commonly chided for believing more often than Democrats that the U.S. found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Democrats are also...

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