New York Times Blows Military Murders Report - Again

Ann Coulter noticed that The New York Times just recycled an article about the supposedly high murder rate for returned Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

In January a year ago The New York Times ran an article about the “high murder rate” of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan service. I immediately noticed that The New York Times didn’t provide any murder rates statistics from civilian populations, or even from the military. All The Times article contained were anecdotes.

I posted “New York Times Blows Military Murders Report” on January 13 last year.

Before writing my post, I made a cursory review of internet sites, the sort of thing I would have expected The Times to do as a minimum, and found what I expected: murder is primarily an activity of young males. The veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are predominantly young males. Therefore, to make an apples to apples comparison, all we need do is answer a very simple question: What was their murder rate, and how did it compare to the murder rates of other young males?

The murder rate for military veterans was easy to compute: 8 per 100,000 per year. What should that rate be compared to? A typical American city rate?

I decided to be nasty, and compare it to two California cities with high murder rates, Oakland and Richmond in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was no contest. The Oakland and Richmond rates for young males were about ten times higher than the veterans’ rate.

Then I thought I would compare the rates to more “civilized” American cities, but instead I chose New York and San Francisco. The San Francisco murder rate for young males was three times higher than the veterans. The New York rate for all males, which includes babies through old men, was double the veterans’ rate.

Obviously, at this point in my investigation I was thoroughly disgusted with the sloppy reporting and institutionalized biases of The New York Times. Actually, such thorough disgust with The New York Times and other main stream media is nothing new for me. I had previously been disgusted by CBS News and perky Katie Couric and their fraudulent reporting of veteran suicides (go to my post totally debunking their article), another post exposing the Associated Press for fraudulently reporting that the Heritage Foundation ranked Europe as the economically freest region of the world, and a swarm of bloggers including me jumped all over The New Republic for publishing lurid and defamatory stories written by Private Scott Beauchamp supposedly based on his ongoing experiences in Iraq entitled “Baghdad Diarist.”

So far it looks like a scorecard of sort of winning one out of four. The New Republic decided not to stand behind the “Baghdad Diarist,” although the last I knew they still did not run a retraction. Katie Couric and CBS News stand by their report, even though it is a statistical abomination. And this year’s Heritage Report on the freest economies of the world is still characterized by the media as concluding that Europe is the freest region, even though an analysis of the Heritage rankings by countries and regions easily demonstrates that North America is the freest region.

Just as it did last year.

I feel like I'm shoveling fecal matter against the tide, but will keep on shoveling because it's fun to have a battle of wits with unarmed opponents, and the increasing financial problems of the main stream media indicate they are losing their death-grip on "truth."

Maybe we bloggers are doing them in, one kilobyte at a time.