The Importance of a Two-Paper Town

No one benefits from only one voice.

The Times said in a front-page story on Sunday that it had found 121 cases of Iraq and Afghan war vets committing a homicide in the United States. But veterans and right-wing critics crunched the numbers and discovered that the murder rate for returning vets is only one-fifth of that of young Americans who did not serve in the war zones.

Yea, but if the NYT had bothered doing event he most basic number crunching (that would have blown their bias and premise sky high), how could they have justified nine pages and half-a-dozen reporters working on it.

Efforts to obtain a response from the Times yesterday were unsuccessful.

But of course.

Justice Department statistics show that Americans in the veterans' age group, 18 to 34 years old, commit about 150 murders a year - an identical number of their civilian peers would've committed 700 to 750 murders in the same time-frame.

More here on the, uh, "unusually high rate" of murder connected to failed, flunky journalists:

Unrelated incidents, or mounting evidence of that America's newsrooms have become a breeding ground for murderous, drunk, gun-wielding child molesters? Answers are elusive, but the ever-increasing toll of violent crimes committed by journalists has led some experts to warn that without programs for intensive mental health care, the nation faces a potential bloodbath at the hands of psychopathic media vets.

"These people could snap at any minute," says James Treacher of the Treacher Institute for Journalist Studies. "We need to get them the help and medication they need before it's too late."

Nyuk, nyuk. I like the chart best.