On November 4, 2005, the Washington Post ran a front page story on military recruiting. The reporter, Ann Scott Tyson, used some analysis and data
from the National Priorities Project (NPP) for the story, as well as
interviewed recruiters, recruits and a Pentagon demographics expert.
The Washington Post ombudsperson, Deborah Howell, responded with a column
on December 25, 2005, criticizing the story and the work done by the
National Priorities Project (NPP). In writing the column, she spoke
with three people from the Pentagon; one person from The Heritage
Foundation, a conservative think-tank; and one person from the Rand
Corporation, which receives defense contracts.
Ms. Howell's column contained erroneous and misleading claims regarding
NPP's work. What follows are NPP's corrections and clarifications:
(1) The vast majority of Ms. Howell's column is in support of
one claim: that NPP's analysis is not nationally representative.'
She cites her interviews with various people and quotes a Pentagon
document at length, which states that the data are clearly not
representative.
However, Ms. Howell was told repeatedly and in no uncertain terms that
the people she spoke with were wrong: The NPP analysis was based on the
entire population of recruits, not just a sample. Without speculating
why the Pentagon and others might make such comments, we will state for
the record: the data we used for our analysis was obtained through
Freedom of Information Act requests made of the armed force branches of
the U.S. Department of Defense. We used all of the data we received
except from the Marines because it was not at Zip code level. Our
analysis was based on looking at all the recruits by Zip code.
(2) Ms. Howell claimed that a researcher from the Pentagon took his own
data and tried to replicate NPP's list of top 20 counties (in terms of
recruiting). NPP has no doubt that looking at a different set of data
will produce a different list of top 20 counties. We worked with the
data we were provided for fiscal year 2004. Regardless, whichever
counties are in the top 20, it does not change our end result: a Zip
code analysis indicates that recruits are drawn disproportionately from
low- to middle-income neighborhoods.
(3) Ms. Howell claims that our analysis lacked context because [NPP]
did not report trends over the past several years ¦ Indeed, asking
questions about where the recruits are coming from now, and asking a
question about where they came from five years ago are different
questions. NPP's exclusive aim from the start of this undertaking was
to address the former, not the latter. Knowing the changes over time
would not have made a difference in Ann Scott Tyson's story on military
recruiting since it was based on the here and now, making NPP's study a
timely and relevant resource.
The National Priorities Project is a non-profit, non-partisan
research group that for over 20 years has examined the local impact of
the federal budget and related policies. Our aim is to make our federal
government more accountable and transparent to the people it serves.
NPP's report on military recruits is in service of this
mission. NPP's objective was to show where recruits come from today. As
Research Director Anita Dancs states in an
AP story,
We didn't know what the data would show, but we are engaged in the Iraq
war, and we as Americans should know who's being recruited.
Our numbers are accessible on our website to everyone who wishes to look at them to form their own conclusions.
