The Sixth Estate

In recent days I’ve done what I can to show readers how horrendously the national media is coping with the news that one of its own, accomplished Globe & Mail columnist Margaret Wente, plagiarizes in her columns. It hasn’t been pretty. First, the Globe unsuccessfully tried to dismiss the accusations as the rantings of an anonymous blogger. Later, reporters from other media offered a wide range of excuses for Wente, ranging from the intriguing thesis that plagiarism is obsolete in the Internet age to the rather ridiculous claim that accusing a reporter of plagiarism is akin to the Maoist purges of the Cultural Revolution. It’s bad enough that I’ve started a link boycott of pro-plagiarism columnists, and I encourage other bloggers to join me in this protest.

However, I also want to highlight the ways in which it’s not all bad news. Some reporters — some rare few — have actually done their jobs over the last few days and, more importantly, have decided to put the reputation of their profession ahead of their desire to protect their own from public criticism. For instance, the CBC has taken the important step of publicly booting Wente from her position on a media panel while the allegations are investigated. The Globe & Mail, notably, did not announce anything of the kind, although the fact that Wente hasn’t published another column since a paranoid semi-apology several days ago may be an indication that she’s on some sort of leave.

Another thing the Globe didn’t do was to give a platform to the blogger at Media Culpa, an Ottawa art professor named Carol Wainio, to explain her views. (Instead, it apparently preferred to engage in cheap shots at her reputation, at least until this was no longer a tenable position.) In contrast, the National Post has done so. It’s highly recommended reading, because she explains her motives for going after Wente, and simply because the Post was willing to give her the space. A Toronto Star interview is also worth reading, for the same reason.

Finally, the Star is also to be commended for having its public editor publish a piece on plagiarism which at least appears to take the problem seriously. This of course stands in marked contrast to the Globe public editor’s attempt to downplay the allegations, and the National Post’s blatant lack of a public editor in the first place (because, according to one of its leading columnists, media accountability is an assault on freedom of the press). Kathy English lays out what she thinks are some of the key differences between how her office works at the Star, and how the public editor office works at the Globe & Mail.

Of course we shouldn’t kid ourselves about what’s going on here. The Globe’s decision to defend one of its high-profile columnists was sadly predictable. So is the willingness of the Globe’s competitors to slam it at any opportunity — and this is certainly the opportunity. The delayed response occurred because their instinct to rush in with swords drawn has been warring with a fear that there might be plagiarists in their own organizations who could be exposed. In contrast, the seemingly pro-plagiarism positions taken by people like Terence Corcoran at the Post and Jesse Brown at Maclean’s are at least principled, even if the principles they hold to are sometimes asinine and contemptible.

In the meantime, I await a full and sincere expression of contrition from Ms. Wente, one that doesn’t wander off into gratuitous attacks on her critics.

The Margaret Wente plagiarism saga continues. On Friday, the Globe & Mail imported an American media export named Kelly McBride to offer yet another explanation for Wente’s sins:

Professional journalism isn’t facing a plagiarism problem…

Our originality breakdown results from many pressures — the overwhelming volume of writing incessantly pushed out into the digital space, the pressure on writers to feed a content beast that’s never satiated, the diminishing economic forces that support professional writing.

Uh-huh. Professional journalism certainly does have an originality problem. But that’s not what’s at issue here. We’re not accusing Wente of merely “relying too heavily on the work of others” (although she does that, too). Wente stands accused of plagiarism. Plagiarism isn’t just a lack of being original: it’s lifting material without attribution and/or quotes, and thus presenting it as though it were your own words. This is not, contrary to what one National Post columnist recently claimed, a new definition cooked up by radical bloggers. It’s bog-standard. It’s older than Wente.

What is at issue is that, in addition to originality, professional journalism has a plagiarism problem. It has a plagiarism problem because some high-profile columnists allegedly plagiarize and, when this happens, other high-profile columnists sally forth in defence of their colleague, trumping up any number of pathetic and contradictory excuses: journalists are busy, the Internet makes it easy to copy and paste, there isn’t enough editorial supervision, there’s too much editorial supervision, it’s because young people don’t follow the same rules as their parents, it’s blah blah blah.

This isn’t good enough. It’s the 21st century, and the media is accountable to the people it serves. We demand that you hold yourself to certain standards, one of which is that you present the work of others as your own. Failing to provide full citations for every idea that ends up on the page is fine. Lifting sentences verbatim is not fine. Most of you are university graduates. Didn’t this come up at least once or twice in whatever institutions you got your degree from?

McBride closes with what must be the least imaginative proposal for solutions ever:

Today’s most original successful writers often combine the new and the old to foster their thinking.

That’s brilliant.

While we’re on the subject of “originality breakdowns,” it’s worth pointing out that a few days ago one of the Globe’s real estate columnists, Leah McLaren, blatantly used her “Home of the Week” column to advertise her own home, which is for sale. Just like Margaret Wente, the Globe’s editors are treating this appalling ethical lapse with the utmost seriousness. There’s now a little blurb at the end of the article saying that “publication of this article was an error in judgement.” You don’t say.

And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, an internal memo was sent around explaining to everyone that the publication of McLaren’s self-promoting piece — which for God knows what reason she felt compelled to refer to on Twitter as “my piece of shameless real estate promotion” — had been “an unintentional oversight.” Yes.

How stupid, exactly, do you think we humble readers are?

In response to a recent, simultaneously patronizing and paranoid column in the National Post which claims that criticizing journalists for plagiarism is akin to subjecting them to Cultural Revolution-style oppression, as well as in the wake of the Globe & Mail’s apparent decision not to dismiss, suspend, or seriously investigate plagiarizing columnist Margaret Wente, I’ve been racking my brains trying to think up some way that I could push for greater accountability and responsibility from Canada’s professional media circus.

Because we could sure use it. The general tenor of commentary from pundits like those described above is that professional journalists are above accountability, that readers do not have the right to complain about their (apparent lack of) professional standards, and that they are simply far too busy and postmodern to be bothered by silly rules like “don’t plagiarize.” Ironically, in choosing to back their own rather than to defend their collective reputation, many of Canada’s journalists are implying what some of us believed all along: that for all our various faults, political bloggers actually have higher standards than professional reporters.

Anyhow, I couldn’t think of much I could do, especially on my own. But I can do the following, as meaningless and trivial as it may be, and I encourage other bloggers to adopt this statement of principles as well (or at least to consider what other measures they will take):

• When I mention a journalist who has repeatedly lifted material without attribution, especially from fellow bloggers, I will always add that fact in brackets, preferably with a link explaining why. For instance: Margaret Wente (a documented plagiarist). I’m considering whether the same thing should apply to any media organization that continues to employ plagiarists, across the board.

• When I mention a journalist who has defended plagiarism by fellow reporters, I will always state that fact, in line with the above. For instance: Terence Corcoran (who defends plagiarism by fellow journalists)

• I will not link to any column by any plagiarist or defender of plagiarism, ever. If I feel the need to write about their columns, I will do so, as I have on many occasions before. I may write about it positively, when I think they’ve written something of decent quality. I may even quote from them, where appropriate. But no link juice. The moment you decided to defend plagiarism was the moment you exempted yourself from the privilege of full participation in the online community.

So far, the reporters I will be treating in this fashion are: Margaret Wente (obviously) of the Globe & Mail, Jesse Brown of Maclean’s, Terence Corcoran of the National Post, Dan Delmar of the Post (and elsewhere), and Tim Harper of the Toronto Star. Unless any of them publicly recant of their views, the list will only grow, not shrink.

I doubt any of them will care what a small humble blogger does. But I’m doing this out of principle, not because I think it will have any effect. I hope other bloggers will consider what they can do, as well.

High-profile Globe & Mail columnist Margaret Wente, whose habitual plagiarizing made the news this week after her employer tried unsucessfully to dismiss allegations by bloggers, has picked up yet another defender from amongst the bloated, hypocritical ranks of the professional media circus. This time it’s a third-rate, shit-peddling moron at the National Post who goes by the name of Terence Corcoran:

Canadian journalism… will soon be held hostage by dreary dictatorial avatars of pretentious rules and political correctness.

[Margaret Wente's] major alleged crime against journalism was to fail to put quotation marks around somebody else’s words, something that is now defined in the blogosphere as plagiarism…

There’s nothing wrong with criticizing writers, but there is a problem when outsiders can use artificial structures to suppress and control those writers. Journalists are increasingly at the mercy of a “public editor.”

Oh, sweet Christ. The blogosphere didn’t “define” plagiarism. Plagiarism was already defined for us, when we went to school. I know you went to a second-rate institution with the endearing nickname of Last Chance U (full disclosure: so did I), but I’m sure it must have come up even there. It’s a fairly simple principle: if you’re using someone else’s words, attribute them. You seem to think this is some random, arbitrary, unfair principle. It isn’t. You’re a newspaper columnist. The sole reason you get paid is because people (apparently) want to know what you have to say. If you’re printing words that were actually written by someone else, and then getting paid for them… are you honestly telling me you see no problem with this?

The most disturbing part of it all, though, is the sneering condescension. What Corcoran is telling us, and he hasn’t been the only one in recent days, is that the media is accountable to no one. It will make — and break — its own rules. Readers have no right to expect that when they open the Globe & Mail or the National Post, the words they find there were actually penned by a professional journalist rather than copied-and-pasted from some random website because the reporter in question was too lazy to do their damned job.

And, according to Corcoran, for me to say otherwise is to engage in “suppression” of free speech. It is to engage in an assault on this country’s cherished freedoms. It is to… what did he compare it to again? Oh, yes, here’s what Terence Corcoran of the National Post says it feels like to be subject to a rule that you’re not allowed to rip off other people’s work and present it as your own:

something of what it felt like during the Cultural Revolution in China, when ideological enforcers roamed the country to impose their views and expose running-dogs, remove people from their jobs and purge them.

Fuck you.

If this is honestly the best you can come up, then the only meaningful contribution you have left to make to the discussion would be a carefully written letter of resignation. Preferably one that you didn’t plagiarize from a career advice website.

As you may have read a month or so ago, the wealthy owner of a B.C.-based chain of community newspapers — the sort of papers I assume Enbridge has been devoting a goodly portion of its propaganda budget to — has emerged as an outspoken supporter of the pipeline. But not just the pipeline! David Black thinks that if we build a $13 billion refinery in Kitimat, the people of B.C. will support the Northern Gateway pipeline. You see, our environmental concerns will be easily laid aside if we’re promised a cut of the profits (in the form of jobs). Black also claims that refined fuel products would be less devastating than Albertan bitumen in the event of an ocean spill, which I suppose is true.

Speaking as someone who was born in British Columbia, I can’t say enough about the way Black has gone about building support for this project. For instance, so far, he’s created a website for the new refinery which, I’m sure you’ll agree, has just about all the bells and whistles you’d want to put on a website if you were trying to attract billionaire investors to your highly speculative project. I’ve certainly seen WordPress-based websites with less professionalism, I can tell you that. (Sixth Estate, for instance, is also powered by the free WordPress platform, but his is much, MUCH fancier than mine.)

Anyhow, the announcement and the company were announced a month ago, but this week Black upped the ante yet again by releasing an opinion poll purporting to show massive support for the new venture. And once again, I have to hand it to him for pulling out all the stops. I’ve rarely seen an opinion poll, at least one that gets widespread coverage in the Canadian media, done according to a methodology as rigorous, impressive, and all-encompassing as this one was:

Mr. Black said the poll was conducted by his own company, Black Press Group Ltd.

The newspaper publisher asked each of its 60 B.C. newspapers to survey 20 random households and placed another 200 calls in locations where it doesn’t own a newspaper. The poll was conducted between Sept. 10 and Sept. 20.

Gee. I can’t imagine what could possibly be wrong with such a poll.

Interestingly, the Black Press website (by my count) lists no less than 96 publications across British Columbia. I’m not exactly sure how to explain this discrepancy, but no doubt Black has the job well in hand.

I’m equally sure that British Columbians will not be troubled by the fact that the owner of a considerable proportion of the province’s non-Postmedia print media is so heavily involved in a controversial energy project.

Seriously. This is starting to get absolutely ridiculous. I’m gratified to see the National Post and the Toronto Star jumping on the Margaret Wente plagiarism bandwagon. But there are still people referring to this as though it was an isolated incident, and there are even some professional journalists who have the nerve to defend what’s happening. I’ll deal with a couple of those in a moment. In the meantime, kudos to CBC for doing the right thing.

First of all, virtually every major news organization covering this story has now stated that the kerfuffle started when blogger Media Culpa released an analysis suggesting that high-profile Globe & Mail columnist Margarent Wente plagiarized flagrantly in one 2009 column. That’s been the Globe’s defence, and people are buying it: gosh, it only happened once. Please, don’t help them. Media Culpa’s allegation is specifically that it didn’t happen just once. Further documented allegations of misconduct by Wente by that blogger can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

Now, let’s recap. After the issue finally went big-time, the Globe & Mail’s public editor issued a general denial saying plagiarism was “highly unlikely” and foisting it all off on “an anonymous blogger.” (In a fine show of attribution ethics, the Globe seems to be minimizing any possible reference, let alone linking, to Media Culpa herself.) That evidently wasn’t enough, so a vague statement that Wente had been “disciplined” was released. That didn’t work either, so Wente wrote her own paranoid semi-apology claiming she was being targeted by political opponents. Then the editor-in-chief published an open letter to his staff (oh, barf) announcing that in the future the public editor would be reporting directly to the publisher in the future (great, I’m sure that will solve everything).

Finally the public editor — whom I will not be naming, out of respect for her own apparent dislike of naming the blogs she is referring to — produced another piece, probably the most appalling of all, consisting of a series of recommendations to Globe staff, to editors, and lastly to herself. Honestly. After more than a century of leading the Canadian media, it’s come to this at the Globe & Mail:

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First, a mea culpa. The projects on the bill-paying side of my life have been quite extensive recently and I haven’t kept up with some of the news as much as I usually would. Which is the reason for my strange silence on the new controversy over Globe & Mail columnist Margaret Wente. Regular readers will know that I despise Margaret Wente. The disgust only deepened a couple weeks ago when, after months of tirades against pampered low-tuition arts students, she published a bizarre memorial to her own low-tuition university arts experience in “the 60s” (barely, since she was born in 1950), back when professors sleeping with students was A-okay (and something which dear old Maggie herself apparently finds “intensely erotic“).

Second, a Media Culpa. This anonymous blogger — I actually do know her name, as do many people now, but the blog is signed anonymously and I will respect that convention — has done yeoman’s work for years now, painstakingly compiling evidence that high-profile Globe columnist Margaret Wente is a plagiarist. A serial plagiarist, at that. For some reason, following an epic campaign on Twitter a while ago, this work broke out into the open. (Although anyone with a keyboard and an Internet connection could have been reading it for months…) The Globe’s public editor published a truly horrendous defence of Wente, cavalierly dismissing the allegations as the “unlikely” ramblings of an anonymous blogger. You can read what happened next in the National Post and Maclean’s.

Now, then. Wente has been trotted out to issue her own apology, and it’s pretty much as arrogant and pathetic as I’ve come to expect from Wente. She makes the following argument:

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Years ago now, the big argument in the climate change community was about how to lower emissions. The left favoured regulation. But, in order to draw in right-wingers who insisted that regulation kills profits, the goalposts shifted. The right invented ideas like “carbon taxes” and “cap-and-trade systems” because it argued that market incentives would encourage businesses to innovate creative solutions to climate change, whereas regulation would just raise prices and contract the economy.

So you can imagine my surprise when I read the current position of Canada’s Reform Party environment minister, Peter Kent:

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You may remember, as I do, how quickly even the most fervent anti-science hyper-skeptics went into fits of excitement over the announced discovery of the Higgs boson earlier this summer. I doubt any of them could tell you what a Higgs boson is, beyond the fact that some wag once called it “the God particle,” and the nickname stuck. That didn’t seem to matter. The moment that some physicists announced that they’d completed their analysis and had the expected result, people who have been droning on for years about how the evidence for climate change “just isn’t persuasive” dropped everything and jumped onboard the God Particle bandwagon.

I was especially bothered by the National Post’s uncritical reception. The National Post is Canada’s climate change denialist media par excellence. Their columnists host an annual Junk Science Week, dedicated to junking real science, especially climate change. The irony in the Higgs boson case was bad enough. But this one takes the cake:

Warp drive is possible. And NASA is on it…

Alcubierre’s formula was reviewed and held to be… practically unusable. That may have changed.

That’s Matt Gurney in this week’s National Post, sharing his justifiable excitement at the news that a NASA physicist who thinks he’s come up with a usable warp drive. On paper. According to mathematical formulae. Gurney is optimistic, although he admits that “it might take 100 years, or a thousand.” Contrast that with his fellow columnists, who think climate change was invented by a bunch of ignorant socialist lefties.

The reference, incidentally, is to a concept known as an Alcubierre drive. It’s one of several hypothetical methods of faster-than-light space travel. As a rule, nothing can travel through space faster than the speed of light. Miguel Alcubierre argued in the 1990s that you could essentially “cheat” by creating a special region of space around the ship, which he referred to as a bubble, which could flow through space-time like a wave. The ship would never travel at faster than the speed of light within the bubble, but the bubble itself would move at much higher speeds. The science Gurney is excited about is a new paper from a NASA scientist arguing that the energy requirements for the Alcubierre drive might be a fraction of what Alcubierre thought they would be. Hence, interstellar space travel is possible.

Well, maybe. Alcubierre didn’t explain how to create a warp bubble, or how to get your spaceship out of one once you’re in it. The drive also needs about a tonne of exotic matter with negative mass (which we don’t have any of, and can’t get any of, and which may not exist anyways). These are not small problems. So I’m truly befuddled at why the Post would be promoting warp drives but dismissing climate science.

I should point out: I don’t think interstellar travel is actually a kooky idea. The first plans were drawn up by British and American researchers in the 1960s, with cool names like Valkyrie, Daedalus, and (hilariously) Longshot. Maybe if we’d put some serious thought into the subject, we’d be well on our way to experimenting with starship design by now. Instead, we’re fighting religious idiocy and facing the prospect of less than a century left before the only planet we do have becomes mostly uninhabitable.

… Although given how readily they swallowed it, it might be a bit of a stretch to call it bait in the first place.

Apparently one of the items in the next Conservative omnibus bill will be reforms to MP pensions. The “reforms” are, in a word, horseshit. They’ll make MPs wait a few extra years before collecting, and they’ll apparently up the contribution rates. And — best yet — they won’t apply except to new MPsafter the next election. In short, the current crop are all safe. That’s Conservative “reform” for you.

And then I turn to the Globe & Mail for its coverage:

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