Canada’s Print Media: Democracy Couldn’t Ask for Finer Keystone Kops
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:
Don’t ever cut and paste someone else’s words and work over or around them. Only cut and paste something you intend to directly quote and attribute.
Really? Globe staff need to be told this? What do you people do in journalism school, anyways? Surely this must have come up at some point in your collective education. Interestingly, the dishonoured Ms. Wente’s alma mater, the University of Toronto, now has an entire Web page called “how not to plagiarize.” It’s geared towards young students, mostly because the pampered academics at U of T were apparently under the mistaken impression that by the time their graduates were hired on by newspapers they wouldn’t need to take a refresher course in how to use the quotation mark key.
It’s at this point, though, that I want to return to the rest of the media. I cannot believe that anyone who doesn’t have a direct stake in the Globe & Mail is still defending this cock-up, and we’re getting well past the point where coming out in Wente’s defence has to be seen as a mark of suspicion against the person making the defence. Particularly when I read something like this:
Everyone is expected to maintain the same standards while working with a fraction of the resources. That’s simply impossible, and the fact that sloppy work sees print is an inevitable result…
This is a silly technicality worth reconsidering in the Internet age. As an “idea synthesizer” myself, I regularly hop about from site to site, grabbing a topic here, an example there… Like many things these days, it comes down to a generational divide in how we feel about copying.
That’s Jesse Brown of Maclean’s, offering various reasons, none of them good ones, for why a professional reporter might find themselves accused of plagiarism. But even that piece of fluff, complete with its absurd complaints about plagiarism being an obsolete relic of a bygone age, pales next to a truly awful piece of piffle by Tim Harper of the Toronto Star:
I felt a pang in my gut and I challenge anyone who does this for a living to tell me there wasn’t a slight shiver of “there but for the grace of God . . .”
Really? Truly? Has the Canadian journalism profession sunk so low that everyone is possibly guilty of plagiarism? I find that hard to believe, and yet… should we be searching through the work of other columnists, too, for anything that the, um, “grace of God” hasn’t been able to conceal?
Harper then launches himself off on a patronizing and irrelevant stream of nonsense about how he might one day find himself accused of plagiarism for vaguely referring to an idea that came up in conversation once with a businessman, or if he happens to remember some words from an old book, or some such. Well, Tim, if your memory is so precise that you can remember whole sentences word for word but so poor that you can’t remember where the sentence came from, then yes, I suppose thatwould be an excuse for plagiarism. It doesn’t sound like an awfully convincing one, though, does it?
In any event, it’s also irrelevant, so irrelevant that I have to think that either Tim didn’t bother to read up on the Wente allegations the way he claims he did, or that he’s for some reason decided to lend a hand to the Globe editors in their attempt to whitewash the whole sorry affair. We’re not talking about a few scraps of information that floated into Wente’s head one time. We’re talking about substantive sentences, lifted from multiple sources, in multiple columns.
This country has real issues to worry about. In the last year alone, we have been presented with documented evidence of large-scale electoral fraud, our environmental protection and climate change regimes have been ripped to shreds, and the federal government has laid aside the Canada Health Act and thus ended, at least in principle, universal healthcare. More evidence continues to emerge that it plotted a systematic course of deception with regard to the cost of a multi-billion dollar military procurement project. And our media is so breathtakingly incompetent that they can’t even agree on whether someone in their ranks was copying and pasting without attribution and, if so, whether it was very wrong of them to do so.
Update: The National Post has now published a defense-of-Wente column too, an odious piece of work by Dan Delmar which suggests that this was a single inadvertent lapse of judgement on Wente’s part, a conclusion so at odds with the evidence presented at Media Culpa that I can only assume this is yet one more pundit who didn’t even bother reading the allegations before shooting his mouth off about them. Come on, people. This is what you’re paid for, isn’t it?
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the salamander
So glad to see you are covering this case ….
Wonderful news to me.. (whew-excellent) !
& Bad Bad newz for Harper-Conservatives-Wente-Globe
Incredible & exemplary reportage … much needed !!!
Casual, enforced, legislated acceptance
of Harper-Baird-Mackay-Oliver et al shallow ideology
and related political scheming
…. is Disaster … for Canada
thwap
It’s like they’re begging us to abandon them.
Sixth Estate
salamander — I wouldn’t get too excited. For one thing, the Globe will survive; outside of the blogging world, I’d be a little surprised if this story has huge purchase, although I could certainly be way off base on that. Second, the Globe is a Conservative outfit, but without them, Canadian media would still be overwhelmingly Conservative.
Still, I think you’ve hit on a useful point. Suddenly the paper’s failure to press a hard line when it comes to political honesty and ethics makes a lot more sense, doesn’t it?
kootcoot
” Like many things these days, it comes down to a generational divide in how we feel about copying.”
Having gone to university back in the mid-sixties, when the ability to write were necessary to both get into and thrive, at at least my alma mater U of Cal. I decided to go back to another college for a couple years early this century to learn about databases, programming and networks, things that either didn’t exist or were in their infancy first time around. Mainframes were programmed with punch cards and papers were hammered out on mostly portable typewriters, though some students could spring for a secretarial standard Selectric.
For handling statistics we used mechanical calculators that looked like some Rube Goldberg version of an overgrown typewriter and were housed in a dedicated room for doing the statistical analysis of say psychology or other social science experiments or surveys.
I was amazed by a few things about my fellow students who had grown up with Macs and/or PCs at home and at school.
The first was how few of them could actually type, using more than one or two fingers in a hunt and peck manner. Since they had grown up using a mouse and keyboard in many cases for 10-15 years, this lack of the ability to touch type, a skill that I learned in ONE semester of my senior year, was something I found very surprising.
Though where I was attending had a great location on a river, with lots of open/undeveloped land to escape to and enjoy some solitude, in bad weather the next best place to go was the campus library…..this cohort of students for the most part never used the resources there.
But I have to admit the most startling thing I noticed was that this generation of students (they weren’t j-school, but still had to submit papers either in English, or other subjects) seemed to think copying and pasting WAS writing a paper. The better “writers“ added their own touch to the product by taking charge and being creative with the formatting, fonts and other such presentation concerns.
Since I was an old school type who actually researched, wrote and provided attribution where necessary and bibliography, in some of my more composition intense classes the instructors asked my permission to copy some of my assignments (with personal info removed) to show future classes as a example of what they were looking for when they had assigned similar projects.
It was surprising also how many students in an info technology program quickly learned they really didn`t like programming, database or the math that was helpful and would prefer to just learn how to use fancier software, cause creating any was just too hard and boring.
Jymn
Rarely have I seen better examples of ‘defending the indefensible’ than those in journalism who are rushing to Wente’s side. As you point out, these rescuers don’t seem to have either read or understood Media Culpa’s examples of Wente plagiarism. Or, it could be something else.
I wonder if journos like Harper and Delmar realize that they are inadvertently raising red flags about their own work?
jrkrideau
@Jymm
I would give Harper the benefit of the doubt here. He is a religious columnist though he is far, far, too easy on what really does look like continuing repeated plagiarism.
Delmar may have done some serious damage to himself if any of his clients or would-be clients read that article since it is completely clear that he did no backgound research at all. It is doubtful if he even read the Media Culpa post about the 2009 article.
One of the things that really amazes me in the mainstream media is how things will be breathlessly reported as something new when for, one reason or another, I have been hearing about it, or reading about it for years.
I suppose in the Wente case, it is easier to keep one’s head down than get a reputation in the news room as being a trouble maker about professional colleagues.
Sixth Estate
kootcoot — I am sorry to hear about your experience. However, as a fairly young person myself, I am not going to allow my generation to be saddled with this piffle. My school, at least, emphasized preventing plagiarism, and it wasn’t a top-rate school by any means. Plus, Wente — the person who stands accused — is of your generation, not mine.
In any event, I’ll certainly agree that plagiarism has become easier than ever (both to commit, and to detect), but this still isn’t an excuse.
Holly Stick
It might help to keep pointing out other instances. I had forgotten about the G&M “editing” George Monbiot’s letter about some of Wente’s misrepresentations:
http://mediaculpapost.blogspot.ca/2011/05/george-monbiots-unedited-letter-to.html
but just now saw the link to that post near the bottom of the page here:
http://orwellsbastard.blogspot.ca/2012/09/did-anybody-see-where-margaret-wente.html
I wonder who at the G&M did the “editing”?
Sixth Estate
Thanks, Holly.
I wonder what the response would be if a bus driver gave an interview and said: “Well, I personally try not to fall asleep at the wheel, but it just happens from time to time, even to the best of us, and that’s just a part of the job in the 21st century.”
kootcoot
SE, I wasn’t making excuses, merely sharing my observations. Overall, I really enjoyed my experience going back to school to learn new stuff in my fifties and from my perspective the whole thing was a major success, I had some excellent instructors and learned what I had come for and more.
I do kind of feel sorry for those that, as far as I was concerned were really missing out on what education is and has always been all about. And there were gems of all ages there, I was just sort of surprised at a lot of what was since my last time in “higher” education had been so long ago.
Truth be told, now that I’m retired from the workaday world I would love to spend my retirement as a student, but for two things. One of course is the cost, and the second is that to access any courses/programs that I haven’t done, or would be desirous of doing, I would have to leave my little corner of the sticks here in the Kootenays and go live at the coast or go to the Excited Snakes.
The Sixth Estate » National Post: Plagiarism is Okay Because Free Press is Accountable to No One
[...] Globe & Mail columnist Margaret Wente, whose habitual plagiarizing made the news this week after her employer tried unsucessfully to dismiss allegations by bloggers, [...]
crf
Here is something very IRONIC.
There is a little story in the Corporate Governess column in the Report On Business magazine (OCT 2012) insert in today’s Globe.
It Goes:
Dear Governess;
I work in marketing, and a co-worker recently accused me of plagiarizing his idea for a campaign I pitched (…) I may have subconsciously absorbed some influence, but the bulk of the work is mine. What should I tell my boss?
~~Andrew P., Toronto
Dear Andrew
The truth. Have you learned nothing from cheats such as Jonah Lehrer? (…) The scandal cost him his job and reputation. (…) Even if you feel no guilt, it’s better to be branded as the big man who shared credit rather than as a cheat. (…) Acknowledge it. Otherwise it will catch up with you.
crf
Now, given the Wente scandal, I guess the anonymous Corporate Governess would have to walk back all that advice. Maybe she should retract her response and give on better suited to her employer’s current view on the subject:
Dear Andrew
You should deny these allegations to the ends of the earth. This co-worker is obviously a whining coward envious of your success who is hell-bent on silencing you and removing your right to free speech. Try seeing if you can coordinate with upper management in your office to launch a not-so-subtle smear campaign against him. Remember, it’s you or him.
Not all bad news in the Wente affair : Canada's online magazine: Politics, entertainment, technology, media, arts, books: backofthebook.ca
[...] 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 [...]
The Sixth Estate » The Globe & Mail: Canada’s Plagiarizing Tabloid of Record
[...] week, the Globe’s public editor Sylvia Stead, the one who printed a shameless and inexcusable defence of her plagiarizing colleague last fall, published a pair of doozies of her own. The first made what was arguably a far bigger [...]
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