When there’s breaking news, especially as something as sensitive as yesterday’s killing spree at Ft. Hood one can understand why the media would be cautious about confirming the details of the event. The journalistic mantra maybe “get it first but get it right,” but deference should always be given to the latter over the former.
But yesterday’s Los Angeles Times report on the shooting appears to have let political correctness get in the way of the truth. Even though it was apparent early on that the shooter was a Muslim, nowhere in the Los Angeles Times‘ report did the words “Muslim” or “Islam” appear. As it turns out, the shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, had never been deployed to Iraq and appears to have religious motivations consistent with a terrorist attack. However, the Los Angeles Times can’t really hide behind the defense that they were being too cautious for the sake of accuracy, because the report contained two paragraphs of wild speculation about the shooter cracking under pressure from the United States Army:
Base personnel have accounted for more suicides than any other Army post since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, with 75 tallied through July of this year. Nine of those suicides occurred in 2009, counting two in overseas war zones.
Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the Army’s deputy chief of staff, has been leading an effort to reduce the number of Army suicides, which has climbed sharply this year, possibly as a result from long and repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The media has an unfortunate history of wrongly pushing the narrative that military service is somehow a horror-filled dehumanizing experience. In 2007, The New York Times magazine ran a 10,000 word cover story about a Navy veteran who claimed she had been raped twice while serving, suffered a brain injury as the result of an IED explosion in Iraq, and was otherwise unable to cope with life due to the stress. It turns out the subject of the story had never been to Iraq and her story was otherwise fabricated, and the Times magazine didn’t do any real due diligence in fact checking the woman’s claims. In 2008, The New York Times again ran a sensational report claiming military service was turning soldiers into murderers — returning vets had committed or were charged with 121 murders in the United States since the current wars began. The New York Times did not mention that while this statistic may seem shocking, returning vets were actually committing murder at a rate five times less than the general population.
That the elite media will exercise extreme caution reporting Islamic terrorist attacks, but smear the military as a matter of course is awfully telling. When the Los Angeles Times report was shown to be way off-base, the paper simply disappeared the account. That’s not good enough. The Los Angeles Times owes the United States Army an apology for suggesting that they were somehow responsible for yesterday’s killing spree.
