Margaret Wente's sincere flattery

Not to mention The Ottawa Citizen. Back when Ottawa had two newspapers (The Journal and The Citizen) our family delivered both.

moved 

For god's sake. Of course the G&M is Toronto-centric but it doesn't change the facts. I have no allegience to Toronto (having grown up in Newfoundland and lived the last 16 years in Vancouver) and I like to poke fun at the COTU attitude as much as the next guy, and I understand that it's a cute rhetorical flourish of yours to deny it, which I have no issue with, but the G&M is a national paper, to the extent the phrase has any meaning. There's no need to insult the moderators over it. It's not like you were reprimanded or anything, just disagreed with. Get over it.

Toronto has the Ford brothers - haven't they suffered enough?

Boom Boom wrote:

Toronto has the Ford brothers - haven't they suffered enough?

Hell NO

*waves to Maysie*

I own it. i posted this image and have apologized to the owners representative for inadvertently being rude.  Why are you continuing to attack me for something I have apologized for.

[size=8]Please stop this bullshit. All of you. Thank you very much.[/size]

As for Wente, the "plagiarism" charge is questionable and in any event diversionary. It truly is analogous, in more than one way, to the attack on Bev Oda for her $16 glass of orange juice. In both cases: 1) The abuses they have committed against ordinary folks and progressive organizations is ignored ("that's not the subject we're discussing!"). 2) It's not accidental that both are women (I'm coming reluctantly to that conclusion). They're both "dispensable". They both allegedly show weakness in personal habits. Gee, what stereotypes does this fit?

Why should progressive people jump up and down about "plagiarism"? I can understand, in school, that we want to be able to assess and assist young people based on their real work. But Wente isn't trying out for exams or jobs, so far as I know. If someone is upset about seeing their words come out of her pen unattributed, let them plead their case. My problem with Wente, I repeat, is her siding with the most regressive forces in the world and mocking and trying to crush anything progressive. If she borrows from others to feed her onslaught, does that make her worse?

@ Unionist

Well it is, and it isn't.

I agree with you completely that propagandizing, and offenses in fair coverage are more important than copying others' work, and I also think much of the furor over this may be due to frustration over some of those other offenses. And especially frustrating when not just the writer, but the paper as well, fail to come clean.

But it isn't just something that should only concern people in school (though it isn't always the end of the world there either). I am less concerned with passing off other writers' turns of phrase as her own than I am about misattribution of sources - implying that one source's words are actually those of someone else.

All media have their slants, but I think we should at least expect a bare minimum of getting the facts right and not misleading us regarding sources and events. Do they always do that? Of course not; but they should be called on it - EVERY time. Interpretation is something many of us aren't likely to agree on, but if you can't trust that a writer is interested in getting the bare facts straight you have no place to even start.

You see it all the time on the internet - someone throws quotes around something that a person didn't actually say, then it takes off like wildfire and many people assume it really happened.

I couldn't find a source for this apocryphal story, but I was told once that bards in Ireland had to memorize huge epics and geneaologies for their clan. The penalty for making even the slightest error - death - because at the time they had no written language and no original source to go back to. So they needed to know they could count on the person entrusted to pass on the information.

And, bagkitty? Shark-seagull's gonna GETCHA!!

Now, back to the Wente-bashing. My favourite topic.

Darn you Maysie you beat me too it by under a minute.

"NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!"

The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders, - nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was, - all helped the emphasis.

"In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!"

The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.

The One Thing Needful

I guess this is a bit of a thread drift, but I think this allegiance or fetishization of "fact" is itself an ideology. So when we hope to discredit Wente on the basis of plagiarism rather than poisonous and deleterious motivations, we are setting up a court with rotten foundations that could turn on us anytime consensus changes over who decides "the facts." That article posted by Maysie and kropotkin seems dangerously ignorant of that.

Let me know when journalism schools start making ethics courses mandatory and then we can decide what the ethical "fact" is to which journalists must adhere.

@ CF

Accuracy in reporting IS ethics at its most basic level. And its not drift at all, since it is precisely what she is being called on.

And I'm sorry, but I think your first paragraph has it backwards.

If I were someone who had words or actions falsely attributed to me by a media which many people assume to be The Truth I'd take it very seriously.

I'm not arguing that there is some absolute objective truth, but neither is it all jello. When people speak there are actually specific words which come out of their mouths, and if a reporter doesn't care whether he or she gets that wrong, or consciously twists it, I have a big problem with that. It's not a rotten foundation at all. 

Unless... again, we'd be happier just reading fiction.

I mean go ahead and hang her for her political biases; from what I have read of her I largely agree. But that doesn't cancel out the fact that this is a matter serious enough to stand on its own, whether some here agree or not.

How, exactly, did this get to be about "facts"?

Wente is accused of plagiarism. The G&M is accused of not trying hard enough to assess the accusation. I think, personally, that both these accusations may or may not be well-founded, but I find them uninteresting at best and diversionary at worst.

When the New York Times repeated the lie about Iraq having WMD, that was a serious distortion of fact - and they even published some lame apology too late. Such questions of "fact" and fact-checking and journalistic responsibility are vital IMHO. An employer lazily brushing off charges of plagiarism against an employee? Pardon me, but who cares. I wish some of the employers I have had to deal with were so protective of their employees.

Unionist wrote:

How, exactly, did this get to be about "facts"?

Because the accusations include not just taking other people's words and ideas, but cutting and pasting characters and presenting them as real people. While the seriousness of the former offense is debatable, I see the latter as a real breach of trust, expecially if we are to think of the news as part of the public record, and in essence, history in the making.

I got onto it because although yes, her slanted editorial style is good cause for criticism, some of the accusations here (and the G and M's lack of clarity in dealing with them) are also serious. As I said, I expect more.

About 175 years ago, three mathematicians - Karl Friedrich Gauss, Janos Bolyai, and Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevski - elaborated the principles of non-Euclidean geometry. They published more or less simultaneously. All three were brilliant. But human nature being what it is, idle minds long speculated over who was "first" and who plagiarized from whom. As if it mattered. The contributions were immortal. Just as was the case when Isaac Newton and Wilhelm Leibniz created, independently and simultaneously, the principles of calculus.

Wente's contributions, by contrast, are mortal.

In any event, the non-Euclidean geometry plagiarism debate was satirized in the form of a song, about 50 years ago. If you haven't heard it, do yourselves a favour right now:

http://youtu.be/IL4vWJbwmqM

wow great stuff

Quote:

Some of my otherwise brilliant and productive friends
(like scoundrels and their flags)
take final refuge in character assasinations;

Catchfire wrote:

I guess this is a bit of a thread drift, but I think this allegiance or fetishization of "fact" is itself an ideology. So when we hope to discredit Wente on the basis of plagiarism rather than poisonous and deleterious motivations, we are setting up a court with rotten foundations that could turn on us anytime consensus changes over who decides "the facts." That article posted by Maysie and kropotkin seems dangerously ignorant of that.

Did you read  the article?  I may even agree with most of the paragraph above especially that Wente deserves to be vilified for being an evil right wing shill but I don't understand how it relates to the article which is taking the rest of the MSM to task for its lame defence of this undeserving media icon. 

Dangerously ignorant seems an odd way to say that the topic was not addressed by the writer.

I think you have laid it out very well in this paragraph. 

The other angle to this story is the institutional bias. If she had been a CEP activist with a slight left slant to her writing there would be no doubt in my mind what the employer's response would be.

[quote=Michelle]

Do I want to see Wente fired?  I don't know.  There are so many incidents previously that she never been called on before, and I do believe in progressive discipline.  On the other hand, plagiarism is kind of like the ultimate writer's crime, so maybe it could be considered a firing offence first off.  But if there is a whole organizational culture of loose ethical guidelines for their columnists (which seems to be the case since Carol Waino has brought so many other Wente gaffes to the attention of the Globe and no one seems to have done much to sanction Wente other than put little correction notes under a few of her columns), then firing one person could be seen as scapegoating her and brushing the institutional issues under the rug.  So I'll leave that question to her, her union if she's a member of one, and her boss to figure out.

[/quote

Unionist wrote:

Why does a journalist who copies without attribution merit a national outcry, but not one who (say) writes columns supporting warmongering or misogyny?

Has no one ever criticized Wente for her writing? Here's just the first example to the contrary which popped up in these pages when I did a search:

http://rabble.ca/babble/rabble-news-features/what-wente-wrote

I understand that you feel her bias is more important than her false reporting, but I fail to see how it is an either/or situation. I feel quite capable of walking AND chewing gum on this one.

Why we're talking about this? Because she DID get caught on a technical point - one which not only is a breach of trust to readers, but also may be an issue for the people she took from without attribution. It is also a black eye for the newspaper.

Political bias may be more of a bugbear for some, and in the long run do more damage, but opinion - even offensive - is not necessarily grounds for dismissal. After all - they hired her. A clear breach of journalistic standards, however, may be. That's why we are talking about this.

And as I said already, I take the breach of standards more seriously because - unlike bias -  that is something I won't be able to pick out of her writing unless I do the kind of detective work Carol Wainio has done.

And whether she is fired or not, the more important problem for me is that we don't know if she can be trusted, rather than the actual breach of the rules.

But really, I don't know why we are talking about any of this. We all know the real crime is that haircut of hers.

(or can I say that?... I mean the real absurdist crime is her being a Torontonian)

Michelle wrote:

Unionist, love.  Are you being intentionally contrarian?  ;)

Aw, Michelle, you know I'd never do that!

Seriously though, my point has been simple (maybe too simple), and people can agree with it or not. Let me formulate it simply:

Why does a journalist who copies without attribution merit a national outcry, but not one who (say) writes columns supporting warmongering or misogyny?

Why does Bev Oda get fired over lavish expenses, but not for forging a document and lying about it in order to defund Kairos?

That's my point. It's about priorities, and diversions.

And I tell you honestly, if some media monitor website dedicated its existence to finding examples of plagiarism in the works of Naomi Klein or Judy Rebick etc. - and if they found some - I would have no more respect for that media monitor's efforts than I do for the article which I dumped on above. Would you respect those efforts?

ETA: Edited to clarify, see boldface.

Pssst, if we want to be catty, it would be about the fact that she looks about 20 years younger in her current photo than in earlier ones...

Getting back to our usual rabblian (or Rabelasian) standards, the Globe went downhill very quickly upon its slick-and-shiny redo a few years back (hmm...). It stopped being much more than a lifestyle, real-estate and business touting rag.

Imagine getting Wente, of all people, to write about cycling - she of the SUV in TORONTO (this is not a Toronto-phobic comment; I don't like bashing anywhere, it is simply absurd to drive such a thing in a major city unless you have some strange type of trade-related requirement; and most tradespersons prefer vans and such).

Cycling is not interesting to that rag as a form of healthy, affordable and environmentally-sustainable transport, or as a way one can take a cheap holiday - it is only interesting if it can sell glitz.

People have been cycling in Tuscany for many decades. Even old villagers - and if the hill is too high for them with their old knees and old biciclette, they simply get off and lean on the bike, pushing up the hill.