Most UK journalists wonder what the fuss is about, but the US media industry is rife with people being fired for ‘plagiarising’ other reporters’ work – ie quoting it without attribution. Plagiarism is obviously a Bad Thing, but David Simon, a former reporter now best known as creator of Homicide: Life On the Street and The Wire, argues that publishers are going too far.
Christopher Hitchens joins lawsuit against the US President and Vice President
The Hitch has joined a group of people who are arguing that the NSA’s wiretapping has infringed their first amendment rights. I don’t think they have a huge chance of success, but it’s not totally pointless. It probably has a better chance of success than anything Congress will do.
Highbury bidders down to two
Accountancy Age reckons Ernst and Young have whittled the list of potential buyers for Highbury’s assets down to two: Imagine (as I’d hinted at some time ago) and Remnant Media (which I suggested on Friday). I’m surprised that EMAP and Dennis aren’t on the list, if the article is true, but not totally staggered: Highbury, as it stands, isn’t a natural fit for any publishing company except Future so many of the likely bidders might simply have decided there’s not enough that does gel to be worth the acquisition costs.
Imagine’s MD Damian Butt denied any interest in Highbury not so long ago, but he certainly doesn’t rule it out. Remnant haven’t said anything, but if they are after Highbury, Front is clearly their real target. I doubt they think Front by itself is worth over £5 million, but they might well be looking to acquire some adult titles that don’t come in opaque cellophane covers.
If my spy is right, we should know by tomorrow who’s the lucky winner.
Journalism morally indefensible?
From Janet Malcolm’s Journalist and the Murderer
“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”
What do you think?
Teen reporters unmask man claiming to be a British duke
From today’s Romensko:
High school journalists in Stillwater, MN investigated a man pretending to be teenage member of British royalty who wanted to enroll at their school. They discovered that “Caspian James Crichton-Stuart IV, the Fifth Duke of Cleveland” was actually Joshua Gardner, a 22-year-old convicted sex offender from Austin, MN. “Why would a member of the royal family come to Minnesota to go to school?” asks a school newspaper staffer. When quizzed last month by student journalists, “his accent started to falter, and he became agitated,” says a student editor.
Wow. Just like Scooby Doo.
Still, all it would have taken was just one English person to have heard his name and that would have been “case solved”. For Americans reading this, claiming to be called “Caspian James Crichton-Stuart IV, the Fifth Duke of Cleveland” is to being English as claiming to be called “Brittany Mary-Lou Faffermeir-Kerry from Springfield, Hawaii” is to being American.
By the way, if he’d actually described himself as a “British duke” or having a “British accent” that would have given the game away even quicker: we only talk about English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh accents here and only ever Scottish or English dukes. Only Americans talk about British accents or dukes. Just some advice if you’re ever planning on passing yourself off as someone British…
PS Did you see what I did there?
The ethical challenge comes back with a vengeance
So I decided not to pitch to that lifestyle mag with the porn bound in that approached me. Ethical problem solved by erring on the side of the angels, I reckon. But it seems that’s not enough for those ethics testers in the sky. Because today I hear a rumour that Remnant Media, publisher of Asian Babes and other “gentlemen’s magazines”, might be cruising after Highbury because of its ownership of Front – Loaded for those who can’t reach that “illustrious” mag because they’ve stunted their growth.
I refused to pitch articles to Evil.
Then Evil came after me and begged me to pitch.
Now, Evil is going to buy someone I already work for and dare me to stop working for them out of principle.
Can I pass this challenge? I hope so. I’m hoping even more that Dennis or EMAP buy Highbury’s magazines, though. I can’t really be all that ethical if I already work for Front‘s publisher, now can I?
PS Apologies for the illo, but that was the cleanest one I could find…
Two reviews of one TV programme on the same web site
I hear a tale that at the Daily Mail, two reporters are always sent to cover each story: they interview the same people (or maybe different people), they do the same research and then they write their articles. The editors compare them the better article is used, maybe with parts lifted from the lesser piece.
Spiked now appears to be following the same philosophy by having two people review The Root of All Evil, that eye-poppingly silly programme Richard Dawkins presented on Channel 4 on Monday that tried to claim religion was the cause of all the world’s problems.
Now being an atheist myself but having gone to Christian schools since the age of four, I’m aware of the arguments on both sides and know it’s not as clear cut an issue as Dawkins would have us belief. Jesus or Mohammed may well turn up tomorrow and say, “Yes, I know the evidence in my favour was very flimsy and mostly contradictory. But guess what? I am the son of God, so there.” Can you prove they won’t? No, you can’t. You can’t prove a negative: it’s just a matter of faith, based on probabilities and past experience that they won’t. Personally, my money’s on Buddha though, but I’m just a contrarian.
Indeed, Dawkins’ frothings have gone past the point of usefulness. Where once he used to spell out the case for evolution so that even those with no biology education could see how it was all really, really obvious and well supported, now he just struts about sneering at people and tarnishing the relatively good name of atheism. All that does is convince believers and abstainers alike that atheists are a bunch of arrogant nobs who think we know it all and have nothing but contempt for others who “can’t think as clearly as we do”. Honestly, true believers, we’re not all like that.
Demolishing a programme in which the host just sits there, driven so angry with rage at the ‘stupidity’ of everyone he meets that his face starts to glow and he’s incapable of speech, shouldn’t be hard. Yet while the science correspondent at Spiked delivers a well reasoned and well written critique of the programme, the TV reviewer has chosen to launch his inaugural column with a stream of pretentious piffle that’s impossible to wade through. Amazing. I’d suggest they swap jobs but the fewer arts graduates writing about science the better, I reckon. Maybe the science guy could do the TV reviewing as well.
For once, the former Living Marxism should take a leaf out of the Daily Mail’s book and remember to drop the rubbish version of the article, not publish it and give it greater prominence. Fat chance though.
Ben Goldacre exaggerating about arts graduates and science journalism? Actually, no
One of the frequent complaints made by people about Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science column in The Guardian is his tendency to disparage arts graduates, particularly those that write about science for mainstream publications. Goldacre argues that they really don’t know what they’re talking about, give incorrect explanations for things and generally give science a bad image, with their constant fixation on “formulae for x” where x is the perfect Christmas pudding, relationship, film, CMOS substrate, etc.
Not wishing to generalise, however, I’ve tended to side with the complainants. But today has been an eye-opening day.
I took my wife’s car in to be MOTed this morning. She’s off for a weekend with her girlfriends and since she’ll be working non-stop for the next week or so, she won’t have any time to take it in herself. I got to the garage at 8am, dead on. Normally (I did this the previous two years as well), it takes a couple of hours for them to run all the checks, and since the garage is in the middle of nowhere, I wait there while they do them. This time, however, it took until 11.30.
I hadn’t planned for this. My laptop gave out before I’d watched even one DVD of Peter Brook’s five-hour The Mahabharata. I messed up the Sudoku on my Palm Pilot. Tetris got boring after a while. So I started reading the papers. I started with The Times, which turns out to be duller and stupider than I remember.
First off, the telecoms correspondent said that WiMax was faster than WiFi because it had a speed of 8Mbps. Last time I looked, eight was less than eleven which is the rated speed of WiFi. Sigh.
But then the health correspondent claimed that electroshock therapy was being used more often than before because the stigma it had gained from One Flew of the Cuckoo’s Nest had nearly worn off – not because they’d improved its application, started using anaesthetic and muscle relaxant, etc, although a handy box-out did at least mention those vital sub-points.
So I started to think maybe Mr Goldacre had a point. Then I picked up the Daily Mail.
Hatred of the Daily Mail is compulsory for many liberal and left-leaning people, myself included. Many people hate it because of the things they think are in it, without even having read it. I remember a former colleague’s look of amazement after she’d read a copy. “It’s even worse than I ever thought possible,” she explained. Those of us who had read it nodded sagely. My hatred for the evil rag stems from my actual familiarity with its contents.
So it really was my own fault. I knew the veins were going to start throbbing in my head before I’d even started; I just didn’t know at what point.
It was Melanie Phillips’ column. Phillips had already been the target of one of Goldacre’s columns, in which he’d pointed out the absurd levels of ignorance she had exposed in a piece on MMR. But today she surpassed herself.
Apparently, the discovery that plants produce methane even when not decomposing shows that “scientists” aren’t to be trusted. If they can’t get this right, over “the second most important” greenhouse gas, then how can they be trusted to get climate change analysis right, Phillips wonders? She then explains how climatology uses computer models that can’t be trusted, and that those who believe in climate change are really just anti-American and anti-business.
Having been an Americo-phile (is that even a word?) from an early age, I took exception to this anyway. But the sheer levels of jaw-dropping, vacant idiocy involved in this took me aback. Philliips, who I suspect lacks scientific qualifications of any kind (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong) and who knows the subject so well that she doesn’t appreciate that methane is a greater greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, feels equipped to judge the vast amounts of evidence and work that’s gone into climatology and climate change research in general.
Not only that, but she seems to be under the impression that one group of scientists does all the research in all fields (“Hi, my name’s Dr Steve PhD, and when I’m not trying to invent cold fusion techniques in this lab, I create polymers next door, investigate plant species and cellular mytosis over there and model climate change in the computer lab up there”).
In Phillips’ world, because biologists have discovered something unknown about plants, that means climatologists can’t be trusted. Wow. That makes sense. Using the same argument, I immediately deduced that because the features editor of Daily Mail has run an article on why the Bible code is all true, none of the paper’s movie reviews can be trusted.
In a sane world or on a sane newspaper, the Daily Mail‘s editor would have killed the column as soon as he saw it and told her to write about what she knows, not what she clearly doesn’t. But he didn’t. And I just know that there’s at least two Mail readers who have come away from that article thinking they’re now better informed than ‘the common herd’ as a result of it. Bastards.
If I become Prime Minister, my first job will be to pass a law that only science graduates can write about science in magazines and newspapers. Or elect Ben Goldacre PM: he’s right about them, you know.
‘Subs’ again
Ah, I know I’ve ranted a bit about ‘subs’ before, but a couple of things to complain about this month.
First off, apologies to Ryan Style, whose perfectly reasonable question about Safari for iCreate’s helpdesk this month got replaced by an answer about iChat AV that got written by my predecessor over a year ago for some other question. Can’t imagine how that happened. Ryan, if you want the actual answer, click on the “continue reading” link at the bottom of this entry.
Now the second complaint. Don’t mess around with jokes (or ‘jokes’ in my case) unless you know what you’re doing. Two ‘sub’ amendments occurred in a couple of articles of mine this month (no names mentioned).
The first changed “Macs” to “Mac computers”: gosh, that sounds naturalistic, doesn’t it?
The second changed “the most powerful Mac in the universe” to “the most powerful Mac in the known universe” (my emphasis). So we’ve gone from a slightly geeky reference to He-Man (“the most powerful man in the universe!”) – although take a look at this Slate article to understand the rationale behind my joke choice – to a Dune reference (“the emperor of the known universe”) that isn’t even a joke. Why, why and thrice why?
Possible reasons
- To be pedantic? After all, there may be planets out there we haven’t discovered that have life forms using even more powerful Macintosh computers
- To be philosophically pedantic? There may actually be more than one universe and it may contain parallel versions of ourselves using Power Mac Octos
- To piss me off? It’s always possible
- To stop it being funny or even a joke? It’s a serious business, this Macintosh journalism
- Some other reason? Fill in the blanks yourself on that one
Bloody ‘subs’. Leave my stuff alone unless you know what you’re doing. Or just let me know what you’ve done so I can help you if you have any questions. Blimey, I always used to let authors see what I’d done to their work before it went on the page, just to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood anything. So how’s about it ‘subs’? Or are you worried you’ll be told off for doing things wrong?
Ethics in principle and in practice
It’s very easy to have theoretical morals. You can say to yourself “I’ll never write anything for Associated Newspapers for as long as I live”, knowing full well that the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday et al aren’t going to beat down your doors with thousands in cash to make you.
But what happens if someone dubious does come to your door, offering you money? Is it easy to make the same commitment?
I have an ad in Press Gazette. It runs weekly and is mostly useless; I’ll get round to changing the wording some time, I’m sure, but I doubt they’ll ever get round to so much as hypertexting my URL and email address on their web site. Lazy buggers.
Anyway, I’ve just had my first editorial enquiry as the result of it. A Spanish company is launching a new mag, 24-K, and they’re looking for freelances to fill its pages. The money isn’t brilliant but it’s not awful and they’re looking for gadget and film reviews, which I’m more than up to.
The problem is this: bound into every edition of the magazine will be 12 pages of hardcore porn. And this is a Spanish magazine we’re talking about here, so I’m guessing ‘Confessions of a Window Cleaner’ it ain’t.
Now I’m not especially against porn in principle. My concerns are for the models who are often drug addicted, psychologically damaged after sexual abuse and so on: these are well-worn arguments and I don’t have to repeat them here. If the models were all happy, well-adjusted, well paid and so on, I’d have no issues.
Anyway, essentially, this company has made its money from the exploitation of the vulnerable and anything I write will not only be paid for in part with that money but will be accompanied by yet more exploitation.
On the other hand, it’ll be cash, a new client and more articles to add to my portfolio that could eventually get me more clients, more cash, etc. Maybe this company’s models really are happy, well-adjusted, etc and I’m just making assumptions. And there are plenty of companies out there who have made their money dubiously without any of us realising it: how many Daily Express readers know how its proprietor made his millions? How many Daily Mail readers know that the Rothmeres supported Oswald Mosley and Hitler? Then there’s GAP, Nike, McDonald’s, WalMart, et al. Do I stop working for or buying from any company that may have compromised ethics? I’ll starve if I do.
Suddenly, the ethics of the situation don’t look clear cut. What do you think I should do? I’m siding with the “don’t do it” argument at the moment, but I’m still feeling the temptation…