The Wall Street Journal-20080116-The -Wacko Vet Myth-
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The 'Wacko Vet Myth'
Most journalists consider it bad form to mention the race or ethnicity of a criminal defendant without a compelling reason. But racial and ethnic groups are not the only ones who take offense at such stereotypes. As early as World War I, the American Legion passed a resolution urging reporters "to subordinate whatever slight news value there may be in playing up the ex-service member angle in stories of crime or offense against the peace." In 2006, Veterans of Foreign Wars magazine bemoaned the "wacko-vet myth."
We learned of these complaints from an article in Sunday's New York Times -- a front-page piece that perpetuates that very stereotype. "Clearly, committing homicide is an extreme manifestation of dysfunction for returning veterans," the paper explained. A platoon of Times reporters "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 Times didn't try to establish a causal relationship between war service and homicide. It didn't even try to establish a correlation. The 7,000-word article contained no statistics on the size of the veteran population, or on the prevalence of homicide either in the general population or among young men, who are disproportionately represented among active-duty and recently discharged service members.
Various commentators performed their own back-of-the-envelope calculations, including Ralph Peters of the New York Post, who estimates that if the Times figures are accurate, recent war vets are only about one-fifth as likely to be implicated in a homicide as the average 18- to 34-year-old.
The Times acknowledges that this is no scientific study. It says it probably undercounted the number of homicides by war veterans, since it based its count on news reports. It does claim to have found a large increase -- 89% -- in the number of homicides attributed to servicemen or recent vets since October 2001, compared with the previous six-year period.
But there's the real rub. The Times is purporting to test a media stereotype by measuring its prevalence in the media. As a Pentagon spokesman put it, that 89% spike could have resulted form "an increase in awareness of military service by reporters since 9/11." Or, to put it more bluntly, the Times hasn't necessarily proved that the stereotype is true -- only that it is a stereotype.
