New York Times' False Narrative

Published an Untrue Claim

I recently completed an investigation into the claim that today’s juveniles are committing more crimes than previous generations of adolescents. My investigation was for a television news report that first aired on Sinclair television stations on January 28, 2023.

In a topic like this, the first place to go is the data. What do the numbers tell us? Another source to review is the reporting of other media organizations to see if they offer any insight. Also included in my due diligence is a review publications that follow the topic. In this case, publication sources included the FBI, Department of Justice, Centers for Disease Control, and peer-reviewed academic reports and studies. In this investigation, I also read a book about juvenile criminals written by a child psychologist, and several articles about juvenile violence. Finally, I interviewed several subject matter experts, some of whom did not make it into the final product.

During the course of my research, I came across an astonishing statement made in a New York Times article.

The New York Times claimed “Homicide is the leading death among American children … [emphasis added].” The article claimed it was reporting on the causes of death of “children and teenagers under 18” for the year 2020.

I was very familiar with juvenile death rates from years of investigations of several topics including unintentional injuries, suicide and drug overdoses. I did not recall ever seeing reporting that supported the New York Times fantastical claim that homicide is the leading cause.

First, allow me to make it abundantly clear that even a single child’s death due to homicide is one death too many. This column does not dismiss the seriousness of youth murder.

In order to understand why the Times made a seemingly false claim I first consulted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to see, if perhaps, I was mistaken in my recollections. The CDC tracks all deaths in America. The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics collects data from death certificates from all 50 states, District of Columbia, and U.S. territories. This data is entered into a program called the National Vital Statistics System. The NVSS data is used to a produce a graphic like the following one for the year 2020, the same year the New York Times cited.

As you can see, homicide is not the leading cause of American children. Nor is it the leading cause of death for any other age group, for that matter. Still, I wanted to dig a little deeper. Was there some aspect of this that was overlooked?

Next, I ran queries of the 15 leading causes of deaths of youth, as reported in the CDC database. The database gives limited options to query such as 10-year, 5-year, and 1-year increments. For juveniles, I looked at every five years: ages 1-4, 5-9, 10-14, and 15-19. The last category included non-juveniles (18-19 year olds) that could conceivably skew the data.

Ages 1-4

Ages 5-9

Ages 10-14

Ages 15-19

Yet, even when including 18 and 19 years in the 15-19 year category, homicide is still not the leading cause of death.

Then I went further and ran database queries for the individual age years of 15, 16 and 17 years old to confirm that there wasn’t a spike in one of those particular year groups that elevated homicide as the leading cause of death.

Age 15

Age 16

Age 17

Homicide was not the leading cause of death in any of these age years.

This begs the question. On what basis did the New York Times make this demonstrably false claim? I can only speculate.

The Times article referenced a research paper produced by CDC researchers. I located and reviewed that paper. The research paper did not claim homicide was the leading cause of death of children, but it did offer the statement “Homicide is a leading cause of death among children in the US [emphasis added].”

In reading the paper, I learned the researchers ran queries in the same CDC database I used.  The difference between the research paper and the New York Times article is the Times changed “a leading cause” to “the leading cause” [emphasis added].

The New York Times continually claims its editors and fact checkers scrutinize every detail in every story to ensure they are solid. Are they? Let’s put it this way. Just look at a random printed edition’s corrections notices. They are sometimes astonishingly long.

With so many corrections on a near daily basis one must wonder if the New York Times is really that sloppy?  There’s a saying that everybody reads the New York Times, but nobody reads the Times’ corrections notice. Draw your own conclusion.

The difference between “a” and “the” may appear subtle, but it very significant for two reasons.

One, New York Times stories are frequently republished in dozens and sometimes hundreds of other newspapers as part of syndicated news service. If you were not aware of this then take a look at a few stories in the newspaper you read. You may see below the article’s byline “New York Times” as the source of the story.  Additionally, Times stories are often cited in television news, particularly by the broadcast networks, CNN and MSNBC.

In this way, the media echo chamber solidifies the perception that a false narrative is a “fact.”

I’ve addressed the topic of the media echo chamber in previous columns including The Media Echo Chamber (July 17, 2022) and Debunking a False Narrative (January 12, 2023). Sadly, false or seriously flawed news stories are more common than many may realize.

So, why does this matter?

Two, a false narrative could stimulate public officials to overreact and “enact tough-on-crime laws and three strikes laws and zero tolerance laws,” as one subject matter expert told me during the course of my investigation.

There are arguments on both sides of the “we should have more crime laws” debate. That topic is not the subject of this column.

Armed with the facts, I contacted the New York Times and requested a correction to the story’s untrue claim. Last week, I sent several emails and left phone messages for the Corrections Department, Letters to the Editor, and executive editor Joseph Kahn.

As of the publication of this column, the Times’ story has not been corrected, nor has anyone from the New York Times responded.

And the false claim lives on.

(Update: The New York Times responded on February 7, 2023, 12 days after my several phone messages and emails and made the appropriate correction to the article.)

Mark Hyman is an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, Parler, Post, and Mastodon.world at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.

His books Washington Babylon: From George Washington to Donald Trump, Scandals That Rocked the Nation and Pardongate: How Bill and Hillary Clinton and their Brothers Profited from Pardons are on sale now (here and here).