The Sixth Estate

I know I shouldn’t let her bait me like this, but I can’t help myself. The two-facedness of it is among the worst I’ve yet seen in the Canadian press.

Last weekend, Canada’s favourite plagiarist, Globe & Mail columnist Margaret Wente, published an extraordinary broadside against young women, complaining that they weren’t charging enough for sex anymore and that, as a consequence, men were becoming lazy, boorish louts. In her day, she claimed, women wouldn’t have sex until you gave them some shiny baubles, or at least some food. Now they give it away for free. This, says Wente, is a Very Bad Thing.

It just so happens that a very high-profile American general has just been caught in the wrong bed. David Petraeus, the head of the CIA, has now resigned in disgrace, and there is an FBI investigation ongoing. It’s the sort of salacious story that the media loves. You see, grown-up responsible journalists find tittling over sex much more important than, say, doing their jobs. And for that reason, Wente just couldn’t resist:

(more…)

I thought it might be nice to have a check-up and see how Canada’s favourite plagiarist is getting on with her career. Regular readers will remember that after Globe & Mail columnist Margaret Wente was caught plagiarizing other journalists by an Ottawa blogger, Media Culpa. Sixth Estate has also published evidence of Wente plagiarism. Some journalists condemned it; others claimed that plagiarism was okay, even a shining example of freedom of the press. Shame on those twits.

Incidentally, it’s getting increasingly hard to read old articles on the Globe & Mail website. And new ones, too. Thanks to their paywall. That is, unless you’re one of those whiz kids who have managed to figure out where the Preferences tab is for their Web browser. After that it gets real, real simple. Keep your hand out of the cookie jar, boys and girls, and keep it on your credit card, so that you can make your Globe & Mail subscription payments on time! If Canada’s paper of record is deprived of its income, then we will be deprived of its journalism.

Anyhow, Wente is back in action, and is as edgy and insightful as ever. For instance, last weekend she argued that women aren’t charging enough for sex anymore, mainly because they’re now the majority on university campuses. Women need to be more whore-ish, says Wente, or else guys will start thinking that women actually want to have sex with them, which of course isn’t true. Proper women only have sex if they are given some food first. “Today people just hook up,” Wente complains.

Yes, those young ruffians, they do. Incidentally, here’s what Wente was doing when she was their age:

(more…)

Margaret Wente has published another column, sans apology for specific “careless mistakes” (as she calls them) in the past and also complete with her unique pre-moderated comments section (since she needs extra protection from rabid readers). And this one, entitled “The Best Protection Against Bullying Isn’t Legislation,” appears to rise to the standard I have been regularly setting for professional journalists: sources must be attributed, and word-for-word passages must be quoted. Thank you, Wente. That’s all I wanted from you.

However, since Wente did not explain in her most recent apology what she was apologizing for (or how often it happened), and because the Globe is protecting her with this comments section, the investigation must continue. Wente was publicly accused of plagiarism. Apparently, her media colleagues tell us, it’s much harder to judge that than you might think. What we certainly can judge, however, is the originality of reporters. And by originality, I mean the strangely high number of cases in which Wente and some other reporter happen to publish almost exactly identical sentences. Who knows why that might happen.

Our text for the day is an article Wente published a year ago called “Cures for Cancer At Any Cost,” arguing that we’ve over-invested in ineffective diagnostic and screening tests and consequently caused unnecessary suffering and hardship for millions of men (prostate cancer) and women (breast cancer). Her two main targets are the PSA test and mammography, and yes, there continues to be some degree of uncertainty over exactly how much benefit we’re getting from both tests, on large scales. But…

(more…)

After brazening her way through a plagiarism scandal, Globe & Mail columnist Margaret Wente appears to be back on her exceptionally busy three-times-a-week pace, even though this hectic workstyle was what some fellow journalists blamed for her ethical lapses. I’m sure she wants to put it all behind her. But she will have to earn that right. A first step in that direction would be to avoid having any more of what one overly charitable commentator euphemized as “originality breakdowns.” Another would be to drop the unique, time-limited and pre-moderated comments section the Globe has set up specifically for Wente columns.

Sadly, this weekend’s column, which is a typically Wente-ian attack on government social programs, still raises questions. Wente has done an impressive job of cherry-picking various statistics produced by right-wing think tanks, mishmashing them together and presenting them as highly original thought. That’s what makes her one of the nation’s highest-profile columnists.

Nothing in this article is as egregious as what she’s done on occasion in the past, but still, vigilance is essential. We don’t want to let Wente make any more “careless mistakes,” do we? And unfortunately, this article illustrates what Wente’s defenders assert is a growing trend in the media: besieged by growing labour demands (three columns a week! says Wente, as though the average unpaid blogger didn’t have a simlar workload), columnists are increasingly forced to recycle material, to the point where “plagiarism” becomes a real if unintended possibility.

Like this statistic, for instance, which is not sourced, attributed, or quoted in any way:

(more…)

After Globe & Mail resident plagiarist Margaret Wente returned to work this week following a brief hiatus to lick her wounds after plagiarism allegations from blogger Media Culpa went viral, the National Post waded into the fray yet again, this time via Jonathan Kay. Kay provides a superb and scathing review of the aftermath of the plagiarism affair, calling Wente guilty of a “delusional stupor” and dismissing the bizarre management response — first denial, then a “secret” and unspecified punishment — as “creepy and Soviet.”

But then Kay comes back to what has been all too common in the media coverage, and something that Wente basically replicated in her latest “apology”:

(more…)

The Globe & Mail’s resident plagiarist and cheap-shot artist Margaret Wente has finally resurfaced after a mysterious two-week disappearance, with a typically vapid column on the U.S. election. Strangely, the Globe & Mail seems to be introducing an extra-special moderated comment format just for Wente. They also had her print yet another vague non-apology, referring to the fact that she’s been doing this a long time (13 years!) and that she “apologizes” for the fact that she’s made some “careless mistakes.” Due to the ongoing link boycott, you will have to find your own way to Wente’s column.

It’s certainly better than Wente’s last attempt at an apology, a vague brush-off which implied that the people accusing Wente of plagiarism really just had a vendetta against her because of her politics. However, I’m still not happy with this continuing reference to a few “careless mistakes.” Which mistakes, precisely? Is Wente now acknowledging that she lifted material from more than just Dan Gardner? If so, on how many times does she think this occurred?And is this sort of performance, from one of the nation’s senior columnists, really something that can be captured with the phrase “careless mistake”? Wente, and the Globe, seem very reluctant to use the “P-word.” They shouldn’t be. Confession is good for the soul, or so the Scots say.

Plus, since she doesn’t actually explain what she’s apologizing about in any detail whatever, presumably there will be at least some readers who find their way to this column and aren’t even sure what she’s apologizing to them about in the first place. In which case, one has to wonder, yet again, how one ought to accept this “apology.”

In any event, I thought it would be nice to do what I can to get it all out in the open. The following is a list of recent Wente columns (and some older ones), noting, where I come across one, any allegation that has been made regarding quote-lifting or other “careless mistakes.”

Some may think I’m just continuing to further the political vendetta against Wente. No, what I’m doing is showing readers just how sorry Wente really is. After all, if she’s reached the point where she’s willing to apologize for “careless mistakes,” we ought to know how many mistakes there are, so that we know how sorry she is. Plus, just to show that this isn’t a political vendetta, I thought it would be best to include all of Wente’s work, and just some annotations regarding plagiarism and other problems. Because I think, as you cast your eye down the list, you will find yourself agreeing that Wente is indeed a highly original, insightful, and thought-provoking columnist, and that the nation’s media would be a smidgeon poorer without her three-times-a-week contributions.

I’m linking to all of the articles despite the ongoing link boycott, but only because it seemed appropriate. And so, without further ado, I give you a compendium of the wisdom of Margaret Wente:

(more…)

It’s a day that ends with a Y and we still haven’t received a genuine and contrite apology, sans political cheap shots, from the Globe & Mail’s chief plagiarist Margaret Wente. (That’s not to be confused with the Globe’s chief cover-up artist, and chief self-promoter.) So it’s time to up the ante again. This will be the last Wente post for a while probably. Wente hasn’t resurfaced since her patronizing non-apology over a week ago. But if she publishes again, sans genuine apology, my review of her work will resume.

I have taken deeply to heart a recent warning from a far-right ethicist and Wente supporter, Margaret Somerville, that we should not “use ethics unethically” by criticizing the plagiarizing ways of reporters whose politics we dislike. So, dear friends, I write today not to condemn Margaret Wente but to praise her. To praise her sharp and trenchant critiques, her edgy and thought-provoking stances, her always original and surprising insights.

Last time Margaret was demonstrating her keen awareness of modern feminism, so we’ll continue in that vein by taking a look at a column from earlier this year, “What If Women Don’t Need Guys Any More?“. That column should not be confused with the columns in which Wente waxes on about how “erotic” the student-professor relationship is, how it’s unfortunate that guys don’t check her out the way they used to, and about how, unfortunately, Pierre Trudeau never invited her to bed with him.

(more…)

Recently a famous ethicist named Margaret Somerville, whom I will not link to because of the ongoing plagiarism link boycott, said that criticizing Wente’s plagiarism because we don’t like her politics is inappropriate. That, said the ethicist, would be “using ethics unethically.” We certainly wouldn’t want to do that, would we?

Instead, in the best spirit of Media Culpa, who really got the ball rolling on this, I’ve decided to up the ante by showing, in stark terms, why this was not just a single isolated error from a few years ago. And why, at least in my case, Somerville is right: I don’t like Wente’s work very much. But it’s still plagiarism. I would say the same thing about a columnist I did like. If there was one.

My text for this little case study is one of Wente’s last columns before the plagiarism scandal broke, called “Plastic Women, Cardboard Men” (September 15, 2012). Wente’s thesis is that because women are both continuing to do housework and doing much more paid work these days, whereas men are still lazy at home but are also having trouble finding good jobs, “the patriarchy is dead” and we are witnessing the birth of matriarchy. Because plastic women are flexible, and cardboard men just fold up. Get it?

Now, there are any number of reasons to think that this argument is pure and utter hogwash. One colleague recently told me that reading Wente makes his blood boil, so he usually doesn’t. My approach is somewhat different: reading Wente makes my blood boil, so I usually do. (Like how I inserted a personal touch there? It’s a big-time professional journalist gimmick that I’ve learned from Wente, who is its great all-time master.) But today we’re not going to focus on Wente’s apparent inability to think logically (after all, she herself has stated that “logic humilitated me”). We’re going to search for errors arising from sloppy attribution.

(more…)

The controversial McGill ethicist, well known for her stances on gay marriage and abortion, has come out in defence of Margaret Wente. You know, it was bad enough when experienced journalists like Terence Corcoran were defending plagiarism as freedom of the press. But she may be the first tenured academic to defend Wente in the press. I believe we’ve now reached the nadir of the debate.

Somerville has two arguments. The last one gives the game away, because it retreats to the same paranoid hyper-partisan territory already staked out by Terence Corcoran, Wente herself, and various other far-right propagandists in defence of plagiarism:

We also need to ask ourselves whether people whose criticisms we read have political or other agendas to promote through their criticisms.

Why, precisely, do we need to ask ourselves that question? Is plagiarism only wrong when people of a certain political persuasion do it, or when people of a certain political persuasion make the accusation? What if, say, I ripped off a bunch of sentences from some website, and Terence Corcoran as a climate change denialist accused me of plagiarism (not that he reads my blog, but stay with me here), and my respones was: “don’t listen to him, he’s just attacking me because I accept the science of climate change”? Would that be acceptable to you, readers?

It’s a serious question. As Wente has shown us, it’s far easier to plagiarize than to come up with your own words. If you, readers, would be just as happy reading whatever pap I can copy and paste via a quick Google search, that would certainly save me a lot of unpaid time.

But that’s a tired argument now. What’s a little harder to accept is Somerville’s core argument, which is that Wente isn’t guilty because she’s proven it was accidental:

(more…)

That should sound like a very straightforward and pedestrian proposition, given all I’ve had to say on the subject of Globe & Mail scribbler Margaret Wente’s plagiarizing ways over the last week or so. But apparently not so much.

I know many readers are getting rather bored with my tedious banging-on about this issue, because some of them have told me as much. I hope you’ll bear with me for at least a couple more posts, because it is actually important. The reason is this: we have arrived at a point where, at least in public, professional journalists cannot even agree on whether it just might be wrong to copy someone else’s work, paste it into your own column, present it to your readers as if you wrote it yourself, and then get paid for your “efforts.” It is increasingly difficult to take the Canadian professional media seriously, and the Wente plagiarism affair is a superb example of why. Yes, there are greater crimes being committed by the government every day. But the media is democracy’s second line of defence, after Parliament. Those defences need shoring up.

Now, then. What makes me particularly cranky about the whole squalid affair, aside from the fact that right-wing dunces like Terence Corcoran have seriously argued that plagiarism rules are a left-wing assault on freedom of speech, is that some people have taken away entirely the wrong lesson: that in the Internet age, you can’t get away with plagiarism. You’ll be caught, dragged out into the light, and embarrassed through the cleansing light of social media. That’s the message that was delivered this week by former Globe columnist Jan Wong and former reporter-turned Albertan blogger David Climenhaga, who is skirting with becoming subject to the Sixth Estate plagiarism boycott by saying that Wente’s plagarism was “not… particularly egregious.”

No. The real lesson of the Wente affair is that, as a high-profile journalist, you probably can get away with plagiarism. Media Culpa worked for over a year to expose Wente’s serial misconduct. She identified numerous instances of misconduct ranging from lazy misplacing of quotation marks straight up to all but inventing interviewees out of whole cloth (or at least out of American campaign promotional materials). Media Culpa repeatedly presented this evidence in public, as well as providing it to the Globe & Mail privately. The Globe repeatedly rejected her allegations, to the point of stating at one point that they would not respond to any more material.

(more…)