Today’s Wall Street Journal editorial page calls our attention to one of the typical propagandistic hatchet jobs that pass in the New York Times for news reporting.
In The ‘Wacko Vet Myth’, the Journal notes that, in a New York Times front page article, where factual news reporting traditionally is placed:
A platoon of Times reporters “found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war.”
The Times didn’t try to establish a causal relationship between war service and homicide. It didn’t even try to establish a correlation. The 7,000-word article contained no statistics on the size of the veteran population, or on the prevalence of homicide either in the general population or among young men, who are disproportionately represented among active-duty and recently discharged service members.
Various commentators performed their own back-of-the-envelope calculations, including Ralph Peters of the New York Post, who estimates that if the Times figures are accurate, recent war vets are only about one-fifth as likely to be implicated in a homicide as the average 18- to 34-year-old.
Apparently, being the self-annointed paper-of-record for American journalism carries no requirement of accuracy, nor does it require distinguishing between editorial opinion and news reporting.
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