Friday, January 18, 2008

The Moonbat NYSlimes and How They Lie

You recall the "Killer Vets" story spread around by the NYSlimes. There's one local LeftoBlogger who swallowed it whole and excerpted it on his site; another yips forth in the combox following my quick post on the article.

Here's another actually RATIONAL look at the Slimes' "work."

A total of nine Times reporters were involved in the one-page story, co-authored by Deborah Sontag and Lizette Alvarez, which is the first in a series of articles encapsulated under the title “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 Times 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 author then cites the VFW stats which make "121" a very low number, indeed, measured against DoJ stats on crimes by a similarly-aged cohort.

But there's more:

Of those 121 summaries, 40 do not show direct ties between the stresses of deploying to combat zones and the homicides for which these veterans were charged, and of those, 14 were of highly dubious nature.

Veterans, especially wartime veterans, face significant stresses that should not be minimized and are only just being widely recognized, much less treated.

That understood, it is irresponsible of the New York Times to write an extensive post in effect indicting all veterans, while refusing to even attempt to provide context for their story, and while unfairly including every possible connection of veterans to homicides in such a cavalier manner — even those deaths that were justified, unrelated, unsupported, or had more proximate causes than being a war veteran.

HT: Confederate Yankee

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A much more fair analysis than your first post.

According to your statistics this leaves 81 Iraq veterans so traumatized by war they were driven to take another person's life. I agree that the way the Time's presented their story was irresponsible and borderline sensationalist, but this is an important story that should be told. If it wasn't for the NYT's who would tell it?