Luke Ford

From Powerline:

I’m quite sure there is no chance the New York Times will run this letter to the editor that Tom Lipscomb sent the paper and forwarded to us about yesterday’s page-one "killer vets" story:

Last week there was a fine investigative report in The National Journal analyzing the shaky figures and phony conclusions of a study largely funded by leftist billionaire George Soros out of a Johns Hopkins center founded by Mayor Bloomberg. It was directed by an admittedly anti-Iraq war professor who gave it to The Lancet on the specific condition they rush it out before the 2006 elections.

This bizarre and professionally unethical statistical construct, alleging more than a half million Iraqi civilians had died up to the time of their report in the Iraq War, ducked the normal peer review and made headlines in a respected journal that gave credence to propaganda masquerading as a scientific report.

Now The New York Times puts out “Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles” which is at the very least badly supported by facts and lacks any intelligent context. What it is full of is anecdotal color and tear-jerking prose.

Apparently violent veterans are streaming home “across America” from the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts. So far, out of hundreds of thousands of service personnel who have served there, The New York Times has decided to devote more than 6,000 words beginning with three columns out of five and a color montage above the fold of its Sunday front page to “At least 121” veterans, who happen to be, at best, a fraction of 1% of those who have served.

And the Times piece shows the same carefree contempt for statistical validity Soros’s Johns Hopkins hirelings just got nailed with. The Times claims their sample of “At least 121” veterans makes it possible to “paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.” It’s a “patchwork” all right. A Pentagon spokesperson tried to point out to the reporters that a sample: “lumping together different crimes such as involuntary manslaughter with first-degree homicide” makes it rather hard to draw intelligent conclusions.

Which is probably why there are none in the piece. Instead we get hand-wringing extrapolations like this: “… these killings provide a kind of echo sounding for the profound depths to which some veterans have fallen, whether at the bottom of a downward spiral or in a sudden burst of violence.” “A kind of echo sounding?” “Some veterans?” And the article is full of useful hedge words like “some,” “appear,” “most likely” more common to a gypsy fortune teller than an investigative reporter. Now assuming “some” is more than one and less than 121, that isn’t very helpful, is it? And none of it is statistically relevant enough to reawaken the stigma that veterans of the Vietnam War remember well.

I spent some wonderful years associated with the largest job program in the country specifically working with Vietnam veterans. There were hundreds of thousands of them in the New York metro area. They were over 80% black and Hispanic and more than 60% of those unemployed had red flags like drug or alcohol abuse and a lot of them had various brushes with law enforcement. The New York Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program was largely staffed by Vietnam veterans who helped thousands of them find themselves and get back to work at jobs averaging $22,000 a year.

Our single largest problem? Overcoming the constant fixation news media had for stories headlined “Crazed Vietnam Veteran… .” You can fill in the blank. Everyone alive then remembers the stories.

But when current Virginia Senator, and Vietnam veteran, Jim Webb was appointed to the Pentagon by President Reagan, he asked a lot of questions about the whether any of the many charges about disproportionate problems with Vietnam veterans were true. They weren’t. It was a theme John Kerry played to with his promotion of the phony war crimes stories of his despicable Vietnam Veterans Against the War. And as we saw at the VVLP, it sure took the wind out of a veteran who had worked hard to get ready for his first job interview to know his potential employers were constantly exposed to this kind of stereotype.

If you think this front page featuring sloppy reporting of a statistically irrelevant sample of our veterans is helpful in any way, many of us would appreciate your telling us why.

Thomas H. Lipscomb
Senior Fellow
The Heartland Institute

Those echoes of Vietnam — they’re banging around inside the minds of the reporters and editors at the Times. Our own John Hinderaker provided a masterly deconstruction of the Times’s big page-one story — with helpful ideas for further research! — in "Crazed veterans spark nationwide crime wave."