Last Saturday, I criticized the L.A. Times for its account of supposed military unfitness. My suspicion is that, though the Times was using military “unfit to fight” designations as if they simply meant that the unit was in fact unfit to fight, the designation is actually a military term of art that refers to the unit’s ability to pass various tests. Some of the tests are closely related to actual fitness to fight and others of which aren’t. But especially when a unit has been in combat, the designation is at most loosely correlated to the unit’s actual fighting capacity; and the prevalence of that designation among various military units is likewise at most loosely correlated to the military’s aggregate fighting capacity. Because the Times failed to make that clear, I suspect that most readers got an unjustifiably grim impression of the military’s actual combat-readiness.
After I posted this, a few readers said that Bush, while a candidate in 2000, made a similar error; one reader actually pointed me to some contemporaneous newspaper articles describing Bush’s statements on this (which is much more valuable to me than just a general claim that “Oh, Bush did it, too”). One article, for instance, reported that Bush faulted Gore “[c]iting reports that two of 10 Army divisions were not at the highest state of readiness.” See also Bush’s acceptance speech, where he says something similar, and also this article. (Thanks especially to readers Brent Ware and Jeremy Bloom for the pointers.) My correspondents suggested that these reports also flowed from the divisions’ having been deployed in the Balkans (though naturally in far less taxing roles than the military’s current Iraq roles).
I wanted to flag this, because if indeed Bush was making the same mistake as the Times seems to be, he should indeed be faulted for it. (I’m too swamped to look further into how similar the situations actually were, especially since that’s not really important to my point.)
But naturally this does little to excuse the Times on this score. Among other things, I’d hope that newspapers would have a higher standard for unbiased reporting than would presidential candidates.
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