Media Mythbusters Blog

Cross-posted at the Democracy Project:

By: Bruce Kesler

The New York Times starts a new series, called “War Torn”: “A series of articles and multimedia about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home.”

The first installment, 6253 words, is a considerable investment of ink, with more to come, by the New York Times to create negative impressions of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans and by extension the missions they served.

Yet, the New York Times could not find words to put the 121 cases of physical violence by vets in full perspective. For example, these 121 are a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent of the hundreds of thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. This post does some quick calculations to come up with a smaller rate of homicides than among the civilian population.

The NYT’s does offer this: “The Times used the same methods to research homicides involving all active-duty military personnel and new veterans for the six years before and after the present wartime period began with the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.
This showed an 89 percent increase during the present wartime period, to 349 cases from 184, about three-quarters of which involved Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. The increase occurred even though there have been fewer troops stationed in the United States in the last six years and the American homicide rate has been, on average, lower.”

To which the Pentagon offers this:” Colonel Melnyk questioned the validity of comparing prewar and wartime numbers based on news media reports, saying that the current increase might be explained by “an increase in awareness of military service by reporters since 9/11.” He also questioned the value of “lumping together different crimes such as involuntary manslaughter with first-degree homicide.” I’m sure the Pentagon had more to say, much of it unpublishable for polite company.

In short, the NYT’s has no serious methodology but a serious agenda.

The few stories the NYT’s presents, however colored for effect, are tragedies. But the greater tragedy is that we have to suffer the NYT’s agenda of defamation of another generation of veterans.

BTW, in August 2006, the NYT’s did deign to present 844 words about what even it admitted was the “definitive” study that debunked several decades of PTSD inflation.

I wrote about this study and other studies here.

How many decades will we wait for the NYT’s to surface from its decrepit depths to report on the debunking of its current defamations of veterans’ reputations?

UPDATE: Army Replies To NYT’s

Army spokesman Paul Boyce told Reuters in an e-mail that Army statistics “show little or no increases in positive drug use, driving under the influence crimes or domestic abuse in the past years among the more than 300,000 soldiers who have deployed in this war.”…

Boyce said the newspaper’s statistics “appear to be based on a basic review of American newspaper crime stories from 2004 to 2006, rather than statistics provided by the U.S. Army or the Department of Defense, or even any interviews with military medical or judicial professionals.”