PRESSWATCH : We Stand Behind Our Stereotype
Taranto, James
PRessWATcH We Stand Behind Our Stereotype by James Taranto T here is a school of thought in Journalism where it is bad form to mention the race or ethnicity of a criminal suspect or...
...This showed an 89 percent increase during the present wartime period, to 349 cases from 184, about three-quarters of which involved Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans...
...This very passage comes from a 7,000-word front-page piece in the Times titled “Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles”: The New York 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...
...What Peters did accuse the Times of was “por-traying our troops as clichéd maniacs...
...Does this mean that those who’ve served their country are more crime-prone now than they were in peacetime...
...Sometimes, trying to turn such stories into data—with implications of statistical proof and that old journalistic convention, the trend— harms rather than helps...
...To determine whether such a correlation exists, we would need to know, in addition to the number of war vets charged with homicide, the correspond-ing figure for the general population, as well as the denominators—i.e., the total number of war vets and the size of the population as a whole...
...The first article used colorfully inflated language—“trail of death”—for a trend it could not reliably quantify, despite an attempt at statistical analysis using squishy numbers...
...This the Times did not do...
...An article in the Veterans of Foreign Wars magazine in 2006 referred with dis-dain to the pervasive “wacko-vet myth,” which, vet-erans say, makes it difficult for them to find jobs...
...The increase occurred even though there have been fewer troops stationed in the United States in the last six years and the American homicide rate has been, on average, lower...
...To match the homicide rate of their peers, our troops would’ve had to come home and commit about 150 murders a year, for a total of 700 to 750 murders between 2003 and the end of 2007...
...This reporting most likely uncovered only the minimum number of such cases, given that not all killings, especially in big cities and on mili-tary bases, are reported publicly or in detail...
...After World War I, the American Legion passed a resolution asking the press “to subordinate what-ever slight news value there may be in playing up the ex-service member angle in stories of crime or offense against the peace...
...In the New York Post, Ralph Peters echoed the point: A very conservative estimate of how many differ-ent service members have passed through Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait since 2003 is 350,000 (and no, that’s not double-counting those with repeated tours of duty...
...A serious analy-sis would also take into account the demographic characteristics of the veteran population, which is disproportionately young and male...
...It did not...
...Finally, while many of the 121 cases found by the Times appeared clearly linked to wartime stresses, others seemed questionable...
...The questionable statistics muddy the mes-sage...
...The idea is that such ref-erences gratuitously perpetuate stereotypes while imparting information that is of no use to the reader...
...Was it about killer vets, or about human trage-dies involving a system that sometimes fails to spot and treat troubled souls returning from combat...
...It ended up proving nothing more than that it is a stereotype...
...Surely if a newspaper had run a story on, say, black murderers and were accused of racial stereotyping, the plant that “we didn’t say all blacks are murderers” would not be a sufficient defense...
...Also, it was often not possible to determine the deployment history of other service members arrested on homicide charges...
...Two weeks after the Times story ran, ombuds-man Clark Hoyt answered the critics...
...A handful of killings caused by the stresses of war would be too many and cause for action...
...The Times is trying to prove the truth of a media stereotype by references to media reports...
...As the New York Times reported in January: Veterans groups have long deplored the atten-tion paid to the minority of soldiers who fail to readjust to civilian life...
...In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deploy-ment—along with alcohol abuse, family discord, and other attendant problems—appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruc-tion, part self-destruction...
...This is where things get interesting: The Times used the same methods to research homicides involving all active-duty military personnel and new veterans for the six years before and after the present wartime period began with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001...
...APRIl 2008 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR 61...
...Neither Peters nor the Post accused the Times of portraying all veterans in this way...
...What the Times discovered, then, was a dra-matic increase in the number of news reports in which homicide defendants are identified as ser-vicemen or recent veterans...
...Or does it mean that reporters are more prone to perpetu-ate the wacko-vet myth than they were during peacetime...
...Racial and ethnic groups are not the only ones to take offense at such stereotypes...
...The original Times piece, however, had preempt-ed this line of argument by acknowledging a defect in its methodology, one that the paper claimed might lead to an undercounting of homicidal vets: To compile and analyze its list, the Times con-ducted a search of local news reports, examined police, court and military records and inter-viewed the defendants, their lawyers and fami-lies, the victims’ families and military and law enforcement officials...
...This is a straw man...
...In fact, the Times’s data were not sufficient to estab-lish a correlation, much less a causal relationship, between stateside homicide and previous service in Afghanistan or Iraq...
...Now consider the Justice Department’s num-bers for murders committed by all Americans aged 18 to 34—the key group for our men and women in uniform...
...In any case, Hoyt conceded the critics’ fundamen-tal point—that the paper’s numbers proved nothing: The Times made some missteps at the beginning of the series...
...PRessWATcH We Stand Behind Our Stereotype by James Taranto T here is a school of thought in Journalism where it is bad form to mention the race or ethnicity of a criminal suspect or defendant unless there is a com-pelling reason to do so...
...60 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008 Are they depraved on account of being deployed...
...The wacko-vet myth is alive and well...
...John Hinderaker of the Power Line blog conducted some back-of-the-envelope calculations and found that if the Times’s numbers were correct, “the rate of homicides com-mitted 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...
...JamesTaranto,a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, writes the Best of the Web Today col-umn for WSJ.com...
...JAMes TARAnTo In other words, the Times unwittingly makes the case that military service reduces the likelihood of a young man or woman committing a murder by 80 percent...
...If the numbers weren’t comprehensive, what exactly was the Times trying to prove...
...He began by taking a shot at them: The Times was immediately accused—in the New York Post and the conservative blogosphere, and by hundreds of messages to the public editor—of portraying all veterans as unstable killers...
...The article did not make clear what its focus was...
Vol. 41 • April 2008 • No. 3
