Sunday, January 27, 2008
Clark Hoyt squints at the veteran homicide stats
A week ago we hammered the Public Editor of the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, for having spent himself and his column on a technical examination of Times conflict rules while a huge controversy raged over the uses and abuses of statistics in a front page article about military veterans and homicide. Well, today Hoyt tackled the veterans story; while he is not nearly as critical of the faux-statistics in the article as most pro-military bloggers would be (and no doubt bloggers will peck at him today), he comes as close to straightening out the problem as anybody familiar with Hoyt's track record could possibly expect.
Bygones.
5 Comments:
By 
Andrewdb, at
Sun Jan 27, 11:45:00 AM:
This comment has been removed by the author.
By Andrewdb, at
Sun Jan 27, 11:46:00 AM:
So Hoyt basically says:
1. The numbers we used can't be proven and may or may not be better then the civilian sector.
2. We actually have in-house resources that know a lot about statistics, but we didn't use them.
3. None of this matters to our narrative.
And people wonder why I usually don't bother to read the NYT.
By antithaca, at
Sun Jan 27, 12:45:00 PM:
Remember, it's all about impact not honesty as Tony Blair once put it...today's media is like a feral beast.
As always, despite the correction, nobody gets lost in the numbers and the impact is made.
By Purple Avenger, at
Sun Jan 27, 08:20:00 PM:
The military does not accept people with mental problems or records of serious crimes
Which of course is why the military prison system's cells are all empty, right?
Hoyt is still a tool.
By TigerHawk, at
Sun Jan 27, 08:26:00 PM:
Of course Hoyt is still a tool. But fair is fair, and he did respond to the storm of outrage with about as much as we could possibly expect. Hoyt has, after all, largely devoted himself to making sure the Times does not drift too far to the right.
