Monday, January 14, 2008

The NYTimes does a 'study' and "discovers"...

The NYTimes headline Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles
by DEBORAH SONTAG and LIZETTE ALVAREZ

Shocka... Sweetness & Light notes the propaganda rag:
To compile and analyze its list, The Times conducted a search of local news reports, examined police, court and military records and interviewed the defendants, their lawyers and families, the victims’ families and military and law enforcement officials.
...Needless to say The Times has its usual “experts’ at the ready, like Dr. Robert Jay Lifton — who oddly enough writes anti-US books and even little screeds for the America-hating Nation magazine.
Color me surprised that the "study" fits the narrative of this, the most recent in a long list of frauds by the whores of the NYTimes.

Van Helsing points out the obvious, that American's who serve have a much lower probability of committing violent crime:
Move America Forward points out that despite putting seven researchers on the story, the Times was only able to find 121 cases of veterans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan committing murders in the USA. That comes out to a murder rate of 1.34 incidents per 100,000 vets per year. The murder rate for the general population is 5.80 per 100,000 per year. For men, it's 7.67 (all of the vet killers were male).
So logically... service in Iraq should be universal to lower violent crime rates?

Powerlineblog:
Do the math: the 121 alleged instances of homicide identified by the Times, out of a population of 700,000, works out to a rate of 17 per 100,000--quite a bit lower than the overall national rate of around 27.

But wait! The national rate of 27 homicides per 100,000 is an annual rate, whereas the Times' 121 alleged crimes were committed over a period of six years. Which means that, as far as the Times' research shows, the rate of homicides committed by military personnel who have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan is only a fraction of the homicide rate for other Americans aged 18 to 24. Somehow, the Times managed to publish nine pages of anecdotes about the violence wreaked by returning servicemen without ever mentioning this salient fact.
Taranto
Are they depraved on account of they were deployed? In fact, the Times's data are not sufficient to establish a correlation, much less a casual relationship, between stateside homicide and previous service in Afghanistan or Iraq.

To determine whether there's such a correlation, we'd need to know, in addition to the number of war vets charged with homicide, the corresponding figure for the general population, as well as the denominators--i.e., the number of war vets and the size of the population as a whole. A serious analysis would also take into account the demographic characteristics of the veteran population, which is disproportionately young and male. ...

What the Times has discovered, then, is a dramatic increase in the number of news reports in which homicide defendants are identified as servicemen or recent veterans. Does this mean that those who've served their country are more crime-prone now than they were in peacetime? Or does it mean that reporters are more prone to perpetuate the wacko-vet myth than they were during peacetime?

The Times is trying to prove the truth of a media stereotype by references to media reports. It might have proved nothing more than that it is a stereotype.
So the NYTimes has done a study and discovered the NYTimes is murdering our servicemen's reputation.
Cross Posted at DANEgerus

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