Fact-Checking the New York Times
Elisabeth Bumiller writes in today’s edition:
But as the scandal widens and deepens, Mr. Rumsfeld is said to weigh every day whether he can continue to effectively run the world’s largest military.
Wrong.
The Chinese Army numbers around 1.5 million people — not counting their Air Force and Navy. What’s left of Russia’s active-duty armed forces still outnumber America’s, and even India’s Army dwarfs our own. In five minutes of research, I was able to confirm that the US Armed Forces are, at best, the world’s fourth-largest.
Perhaps Bumiller meant the US has the world’s most powerful armed forces — that’s a fact no one would dispute. Not willingly and on a battlefield, anyway. In other words, size and strength are two very differnet things. But that concept, apparently, is beyond Bumiller’s grasp.
Still, Bumiller’s sloppy reporting shouldn’t come as any surprise, given what we’ve read (and haven’t been allowed to read) the last few years.
Beautiful catch. I’m sure she’ll explain it away by saying everyone knows what she meant. Or that that fact your dispute really doesn’t matter. But in the end, she’s been exposed by the blogoshere.
great job
It’s not sloppy reporting. It’s sloppy thinking.
… not to mention the entire context on the statement in which that error occurred. It’s very sloppy thinking.
Sloppy thinking at the Times? I’m shocked, shocked! (By the way, where are my gambling proceeds?)
According to these guys, the US is third in armed forces personnel after China and Russia and just ahead of India. Just counting army personnel, we’re sixth after India, North Korea, South Korea, Turkey, and Pakistan, and just ahead of Vietnam.
That’s okay—I’ve had professors in the past regularly talk about the US as the largest military in the world (this was during the Cold War).
Point out that it’s not, and they somehow forget that not only did the USSR have a larger military, but so did China. And this was when they were arguing that we didn’t need as large a military then.
Small wonder that, with the end of the Cold War, it should be self-evident that the US has the largest military around, no matter what mere facts might say….
Good god, that’s just pathetic. I didn’t think the Times was that bad, even for a partisan rag.
I’m trying to come up with something sufficiently caustic and witty to say about this but misfiring on such no-brainer facts DURING A WAR is almost beyond satire.
I wouldn’t even bother linking to them in the future, VP. Thay’re not even worth the laughs anymore.
It’s not just that we’re smaller in numbers that the NYCrimes doesn’t comprehend. If one really wanted to send those reporters into a tailspin, mention that our forces were outnumbered in almost every engagement with the Iraqi Army and still managed an historic victory. They’ll never understand that and why it worked like that.
Why is EB’s propaganda passed off as news?
If one were inclined to be charitable, we are far and away the largest military in terms of spending. By a massive amount.
Although one couldn’t be blamed for hoping that a journalist would use clearer language if that were her intent.
The traditional way of measuring the size of an army is headcount, not budget. Think about our force in iraq- is it usually described as “x thousand men” or “x billion dollars”?