Deborah Sontag

Krugman Comes Clean After Recycling Story His Own Paper Debunked

It has to be tough advocating an ideology that requires seeking out things that are bad in American society.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman found one very heartbreaking story Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton had been using on the campaign and used it in the lede of his April 11 column.

Unfortunately for Krugman it wasn't quite accurate. Even worse, his own paper was one of the first media outlets to debunk the story.

"Not long ago, a young Ohio woman named Trina Bachtel, who was having health problems while pregnant, tried to get help at a local clinic," Krugman wrote. "Unfortunately, she had previously sought care at the same clinic while uninsured and had a large unpaid balance. The clinic wouldn't see her again unless she paid $100 per visit - which she didn't have. Eventually, she sought care at a hospital 30 miles away. By then, however, it was too late. Both she and the baby died."

Anger Spreads Over NYT's Sleazy Story on Killer Veterans

The blogosphere continues to boil with outrage over the Times's front-page story from Sunday on veterans coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan and committing murders, a story immediately discredited by cursory research as journalistically and statistically worthless. The paper's main finding, that 121 veterans either committed a killing in this country or are charged with one, was useless without context, which the Times either couldn't or didn't provide.

The story failed basic journalism, with the Times making no attempt to compare murder rates of veterans to that of the general population. Can one imagine the Times spouting out a raw number of murders committed by, say, illegal immigrants? Without context, the Times' big finding was useless, a single data point floating in space.

Armed Liberal tackled the story on that very point the day it appeared: