Right wing media or lazy journalists? Perhaps both.

[barondave]

(A letter to the Mpls Star Tribune. The online story Army Meets Recruiting Goal Again is longer, but still doesn't answer the perplexing paradox. In print on pA9 of today's paper, the first three sentences, ending "... since 1999" are crunched into one paragraph. The longer story is much worse for the Army, and still doesn't make a lot of sense.)

If you've ever wondered why bloggers are needed to fill the void made by the conservative news media, a small story in Saturday's STrib will answer your question.

"The Army said it surpassed its... 12th consecutive month of meeting or recruiting its target." Only on the last sentence are we informed, "[The Army] missed its full-year target" Without spin, 12 months equals a year. What's the real story? If the mainstream media is so lazy that it only prints press releases, then bloggers are going to become the journalists of record. The YearlyKos convention going on now in Las Vegas is a sign of the times.

Comments

[fmsv.livejournal.com]

Both statements (that the Army has made its recruiting target for 12 consecutive months and that the Army missed its full-year target) could be true; it depends on when the year that they're counting starts. If the Army made its target numbers for the last 9 months of the year, but the first 3 were really terrible, they wouldn't have made their full-year target. Hell, if they made it for the last 11 months, but the previous month had terrible numbers, they wouldn't have made their year.

Of course, your other point is still valid, in that the Army-meets-recruiting-goal story pretty much is a press release.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

"Both statements could be true." Emphasis mine. The story was unclear, and it should have been. The real story, iirc, is that recruitment is waaaaay down. That the Army has drastically lowered goals to meet unrealistic standards is the potential story that should have been investigated.