LA Times Caught Fabricating Story About Marines Not Getting Disability Pay
That’s right. The LA Times wrote a sob story about two Marines alleging that they had been denied benefits for valid battlefield injuries, but the entire story was pretty much fabricated.
The Los Angeles Times recently created a stir among the Pentagon press corps, running a page one story implying that the Defense Department was cheating wounded warriors out of their disability pay.
The LAT shared the story of a Marine “wounded twice in Iraq—by a roadside bomb and a land mine” and a soldier who “crushed her back and knees diving for cover during a mortar attack in Iraq.” The LAT indignantly reported: “…in each case, the Pentagon ruled that their disabilities were not combat related.”
A Department of Defense official tells me that a number of prominent MSM Pentagon correspondents were ready to take the Pentagon to task, but all ultimately dropped the story. Why? It turns out that, upon investigation, the LAT’s page-one piece was mostly fiction.
“They’re just flat wrong” said the Pentagon’s Undersecretary for Military Personnel Policy Bill Carr, “we have no such policy, and never have.” Carr clarified that “as for the two wounded warriors described in the article, both were separated under programs giving special, additional and full benefits reserved for the combat wounded.”
Didn’t the LA Times bother to check this story out with the Pentagon before running it?
Isn’t that something reporters are supposed to do? Verify sources and facts?
Apparently not when it comes to stories that fit with the media’s anti-war narrative.
