“My doctors told me this morning my blood pressure is down so low that I can start reading the newspapers.” ~ Ronald Reagan, US President, 1987
Once again, a major MSM outlet presents to the world a “fact” that is total and complete fantasy … and it does it to manipulate public opinion, not disseminate knowledge:
What’s interesting though, is that like all leftist points of view, suspension of reality is critical to keeping the concept afloat. The NYT attempt to push the “soldier as felon” myth, shatters under even the most basic scrutiny. Less than a day after the first part of the series ran, troop supporters were doing due diligence and discovering that like most (L)iberal concepts, the NYT “soldier as felon” story was a load of crap.
It turns out, that soldiers, including vets, are involved in violent crime at LOWER rates than the average population … by a magnitude of FIVE TIMES.
… more.
Iowahawk has a great rebuttal to this absurd story while showing (with proof) how corrupt the MSM is in it’s reporting…or in it’s own case, lack of “self” reporting.
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2008/01/notepads-of-sha.html
It turns out, that soldiers, including vets, are involved in violent crime at LOWER rates than the average population … by a magnitude of FIVE TIMES.
It doesn’t surprise me in the least bit.
You have to have morality and a conscience to have “shame”…the corporate 4th estate news whores don’t qualify.
This is the same cadre of criminal accessories who kept the Klinton’s dark secrests and also ran interference for the crimes of the Chretien/Martin cartel until they could no longer keep a lid on it.
Corporate media is about conditioning its subscribers and selling the goods of its patrons…not news or reality.
I was going to give the link to the Iowahawk post as well. Glen beat me to it. Iowahawk is truly an American treasure.
WLM –
“This is the same cadre of criminal accessories who kept the Klinton’s dark secrets and also ran interference for the crimes of the Chretien/Martin cartel until they could no longer keep a lid on it.”
Bill O’Relly on FOX Cable has been hammering the NYT over their apparent disingenuous story for some time.
Now if only we could get his equivalent in Canadian MSM, eh?
Another feeble attempt to slander American soldiers in the name of hating Bush and America itself. They’ll stop at nothing to get their way. Thankfully the only people eating this one up are the usual suspects.
More here:
“Committing journalism stress syndrome”
Mark
Ottawa
This perhaps explains what http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=12383“ rel=”nofollow nofollow”> Franklin Foer has been up to since last fall’s Beauchamp saga and Foer’s own magnum opus of self justification in last December’s The New Republic. Not that anyone asked the question.
For a nostalgia trip on MSM lies/deceits/propaganda check out this item at IsraPundit about two famous Vietnam era photos.
Read the two linked stories containing very illuminating information about some infamous award-winning photos during the Vietnam era — the poor innocent peasant shot in the head at point blank range [hint: not an innocent civilian — had just murdered a S. Vietnam policeman and his whole family] and the little girl napalmed while running naked down the road [hint: honest accident but NOT by US]. Comment #1 provides some additional info.
Oh, and a little background on Pullitzer who thought the role of the media wasn’t to report facts but to advance a “world-improving” agenda, a contribution not unlike that of Alfred Nobel.
I linked Iowahawks take on this a day or two , on another thread . It’s one of his funniest pieces , and the linkede articles are devestating . Bylines of Brutality , sums it up pretty well .
the New York Times is a far-left news organization and their agenda is to defeat conservative opinion period
interesting to note that the CBC is continually quoting and referencing the New York Times in their “reporting”
the bias and spin of the MSM is the principle reason why their audience numbers and circulations are in steep decline – there are other factors such as the internet but honest and credible News organizations remain profitable
Joe Molnar said:
“Bill O’Relly on FOX Cable has been hammering the NYT over their apparent disingenuous story for some time.
Now if only we could get his equivalent in Canadian MSM, eh?”
Well I don’t really put much credibility in what O’Reilly or Fox have to say…they are still corporate whores with their own little patron cartel to shill for…about all we can say is that they are the “competition” that provides an alternate type of “cobditioning” to CNN…both spin and condition you to status quo paradigms and social myths…I figure a talkshow conservative is just as dangerous as a talkshow Liberal..both are the products of cindituiobed thinking.
Critical independent thinking and no partisan/patronage clients to shill for…this is what makes a free citizen and a proper alternative media source.
It turns out, that soldiers, including vets, are involved in violent crime at LOWER rates than the average population … by a magnitude of FIVE TIMES.
That’s likely because they are trained and learn when to appropriately use force. Leftards tend to be passive-aggressive and use sneaky tactics to get their way, so as to avoid confrontation and possible negative response to their machinations. They typically are unable to fight fair on a one-to-one footing with opponents, so they intentionally muddy the waters hoping that confusion will defeat “the enemy”.
That “enemy” is us, i.e., those who prefer to think for ourselves. “They” are those who wish to dictate to others and hope to gain a Mandarin-like status once the conversion is complete. Surprise for them, though, as useful idiots are also easily discarded.
It is the same in Canada. The MSM quickly , but with a pious face , announces the death of every Canadian soldier. However , when Canadian soldiers were in Bosnia , the MSM was silent about any casualties … I guess because it was Ok for soldiers wearing blue helmets to get hurt in the name of the UN because they were not shooting their guns, but not one they put on a green helmet.
Brian ,
Never thought of it that way , excellent point .
No Brian. Canuck soldiers were dying trying to protect the MSM’s buddies,the Muzzies. I’m surprised they didn’t report every death as a martyrs death since they were doing it for the religion of peace.
Always remember to a socialist: the fantasy future is more important than the present reality. The present reality is treated with contempt in place of the desired fantasy future. Socialists are dreamers and schemers not in touch with what is really going on today. (real conservative)
Would not this be called a ‘slam dunk’ in sport terminology?
From Jack Kelly:
What is the basis for this startling conclusion?
Apparently Ms. Sontag and Ms. Alvarez did a search of the Nexis database of newspaper articles and found 121 stories of murders committed by veterans since the war on terror began. They then described some of those murders in lugubrious and exhaustive detail.
“‘He came back different’ is the shared refrain of the defendants’ family members, who mention irritability, detachment, volatility, sleeplessness, excessive drinking or drug use, and keeping a gun at hand,” wrote Ms. Sontag and Ms. Alvarez.
Ms. Sontag and Ms. Alvarez apparently have learned what little they “know” about the military from Rambo movies, and never learned much about statistics.
For openers, they lumped involuntary manslaughter with homicide, and those just charged with those who have been convicted, which makes the statistical correlations they didn’t bother to do more difficult.
Their story doesn’t just grossly exaggerate and sensationalize a problem, it fabricates one that mostly doesn’t exist. It’s the sloppiest, most biased story I’ve ever seen in journalism.
The 121 murders have to be placed in context. More than half a million Army soldiers have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army Secretary Pete Geren said in a speech last October. So have at least 200,000 Marines, sailors and airmen. Divide 700,000 by 121, and that means for every combat veteran who committed a murder, there were (at least) 5,785 who didn’t.
The murderers among the vets amount to about 17 per 100,000. So how does this compare with the civilian population?
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), there were, on average, 8.7 murders per 100,000 people annually between 1976 and 2005. The figure for combat veterans is nearly twice that high. Sounds like a problem.
But wait a minute. The 121 murders committed by veterans have been since the war on terror began, a period now of more than six years. To be kind to the New York Times reporters, lets call it four years. That means the annual rate of murders by combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan is about 4.5 per 100,000, or about half that of the civilian population.
Now wait another minute. Most murders are committed by young men. Males accounted for 88.8 percent of all homicides for the period studied, the BJS said. Men and women aged 18-24 accounted for 36.6 percent, men and women aged 25-34 for 28.4 percent.
In 2005, there were 26.5 murderers per 100,000 people aged 18-24, the BJS said. For those aged 25-34, there were 13.5 murderers per 100,000. Compare this to combat vets at 4.5 per 100,000, with the understanding that the Armed Forces are comprised overwhelmingly of men aged 18-34.
“To match the homicide rate of their peers, our troops would have had to come home and commit about 150 murders a year, for a total of about 700 to 750 murders between 2003 and the end of 2007,” noted retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters.
The statistical bottom line: their civilian peers are five times more likely to commit murder than are vets of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Seems to me that if there’s a problem, it’s with the civilians, not the soldiers. But Ms. Sontag and Ms. Alvarez had a “narrative” — perpetuating the myth of the Wacko Vet — and they ignored, or twisted, pertinent facts that didn’t fit it.
The editors of the New York Times are mad at our soldiers and Marines for winning the war in Iraq. Our soldiers and Marines have embarrassed the editorial board, which has declared the war lost more often than Hillary Clinton has used the word “change.”
This abominable story is the Times’ way of getting even.
“‘He came back different’ is the shared refrain of the defendants’ family members, who mention irritability, detachment, volatility, sleeplessness, excessive drinking or drug use, and keeping a gun at hand,” wrote Ms. Sontag and Ms. Alvarez.
A popular sig at slashdot is, “Whenever I hear the word ‘activist’ I instinctively reach for my gun”.
PiperPaul: That would appear to be a variation on this quote, often attributed to Hermann Goering:
‘”Wenn ich Kultur höre … entsichere ich meinen Browning,” “Whenever I hear of culture… I release the safety-catch of my Browning!”‘
Mark
Ottawa
The kind of crimes that the liberal left-wing news media will never ever cover like a gang of black or chicano thugs beating up on white persons or the truth about JENA 6
Brian Wrote:
“The death of every Canadian soldier. However , when Canadian soldiers were in Bosnia , the MSM was silent about any casualties … ”
That’s because the Liberals were in power and pretended that we were “peacekeeping” when in fact we were in an outright shooting war – and if I recall 26 body bags returned to Canada – God rest their souls. There was very limited coverage of Canadian deaths by the press during this mission
because the national media works so well with the Liberals that they did not want to embarrass them, that’s about all I can figure.
Just as in the US the NYT don’t have that problem with Conservatives, so what does that say about them?
The national press gallery here are in a snit -STILL- about Harper not playing by the rules, i.e the Liberal rules of engagement. Tough shit, deal with it – they are supposed to be professional. It doesn’t matter what Harper does, they find a problem. They are proving to the country they are the Liberal PR wing.
The CBC coaching a Liberal on questions to a committee is especially bad and proves a bias.
[quote]both spin and condition you to status quo paradigms and social myths[/quote]
WL Mackenzie,
Paradigns (My least favorite word): best used to describe an Australian’s Fondness for Sheep.
I agree with you! They have a hidden agenda that in some cases may be unethical!
Fox news has the show Greta, who is a lawyer, and she does legal investigations & interviews people under investigation or on trial. She & most of the lawyers on the show are away over the line and have become a useful tool for the prosecution. Just look at the “Peterson” case. He is feeding his lawyer BS and the prosecution can’t build a circumstantial case. Greta wants an exclusive interview so he can explain himself. Bad legal advice is not the role of television
The myth that Justice is fair & all you have to be is honest is BS
When defendant’s lawyer advices his client “don’t talk to anyone” even intelligent people assume that “anyone” does not include their own lawyer. IT does!
All information provided may be independently verified, by the procecution, and used to build a circumstantial (Truth mixed with Pure fiction) case against an innocent person.
I think lawyers should read “Miranda Rights” to their clients, and explain the difficulty of proving a negative. The “detailed” alibi must never be offered to one’s lawyer until the prosecution has disclosed the charges & hard facts
We have prisons full because lawyers are abusing the system
It’s funny, conservatives. You read the paper to raise your blood pressure, because you consider the legacy news sources to be so far tilted to the left.
When I read those papers, my blood pressure rises because I find them horrendously tilted towards the right. Some more than others, of course.
However the truth is probably that the legacy media are just really really inaccurate in general, and that their shoddy work shows from both the supposed left and right positions.
So kudos for posting a link Cjunk, and doing your part to raise the s:n. I think however, there’s a bit of an ‘echo hall’ effect going on — you’re linking to a site linking to a site that links to a site that contains an interview with a guy who claims that a website generally has certain information. So it really doesn’t serve much, other than to confirm your suspicions, because the whole thing rests upon the word of the person interviewed, the reliability of the transcription, and the reputation of the website that carries the interview. If you really want this post to clearly amplify it’s signal, find the statistics page Peters was talking about(before I do), and post a link to them. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, but other’s won’t.
Also; real conservative — why don’t you pick on someone in particular, rather than bayoneting your favourite straw man?
tmg1, please try backing your “opinion” or “assertion” that newspapers are right-leaning with some evidence.
We provide evidence of left-leaning bias everyday here…not just opinion. Plus, you can read about the overwhelming liberal bias in the USA at the School of Journalism, an MSNBC investigative report and George Mason University. These are just the studies that I have found in a 30 second google search.
Over 80% of journalists in the US donate to the Democratic Party only.
Granted, those are American studies, but the circumstantial evidence indicates that the same trends hold true up here. So, opine all you want, but saying so doesn’t make it true.
I don’t mean to be a pedant, but five orders of magnitude is 100,000 times. (10^5) If what you meant was five times, that’s what you should have said. Let’s try to be accurate in our characterizations.
tmq1:
Here is a link to Colonel Peters’ article in the New York Post:
http://www.nypost.com/seven/01152008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/smearing_soldiers_265875.htm?page=0
He gives instructions on how to get the numbers from the US Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Jack Kelly (see above post by me) gives some additional details in crunching the numbers.
Phillip G Shaw said:
“ox news has the show Greta, who is a lawyer, and she does legal investigations & interviews people under investigation or on trial. She & most of the lawyers on the show are away over the line and have become a useful tool for the prosecution. (…)
The myth that Justice is fair & all you have to be is honest is BS”
Yes the corporate media do have their own agendas….as I said it is to instill in us a calm that the status quo is working and dood…this is a prime example…American courtrooms have become as infected as Canadian courtrooms with politics and bur4eaucratic truncation of civil liberty…you chances of recieving constitutional justice in a court these days is next to nill unless you can pay for a dispensation…MSM (and hollywood) productions like this fantasize the legal system and present a manufactured justice to viewers…something palatable that is much more acceptable than the harsh realities of politicized, agenda-driven justice which is the reality….they do the same with police shows.
Everything is fine…go on grazing…big brother will control the vertical, control the horizontal…control your reality.
If you have a TV in the house you are at risk.
Eeyore:
Honourable request on your part, I’m sure, but I really can’t stand them. They upset me. I am normally a fairly calm person, but I really get worked up over them. Keeping this in mind I would rather not honour your request, for my own wellbeing(I already have a history of heart problems, and would rather not push my luck any more than I am already).
I’m not here for that right now anyway; I’m here to help the poster make his point more effectively, and to make people, like you, aware that there are people out here who share your opinion of the press, but from the a different angle, since it’s becoming clearer by the day that the belief is mutual.
I’m sorry I didn’t document much of my pretty much daily rants during the winter 2005-6 when the National Post was dropped off free across the local university. I’m sure that would have been much to your pleasure.
That being said, if I find myself ever in the papers, I will make notes about my experience, and try to post them for you somewhere. But since I don’t have any money with which to purchase them, nor really the spare time to go through them, I don’t expect that to be soon.
Oh, and thank you, Brent Weston, you are a boon to the online community.