Following on from the earlier guest post from our York colleague Dawn Bazely regarding the Globe and Mail plagiarism case, we asked Dawn to tie up the loose ends by identifying some of the positives that have emerged from the whole affair. This is what she has to say....
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There was a lot of learning to be had from following the
Margaret Wente story last week. All in all, last week was important if you have
ever written an assignment (e.g. essay or laboratory report), or have taught
any form of writing or have read a newspapers or magazine. This covers pretty
much most of the Canadian population!
Questions were raised by mainstream journalists, bloggers
and hundreds of the readers of online stories, about whether Wente was guilty
of plagiarism, and the behaviour of a number of Globe and Mail staff in
responding to this allegation. These stories came out in publications that
included Macleans,
the Toronto
Star, the National
Post, and Toronto Life, and even the Guardian.
Those asking questions included John Miller, a
former dean of journalism at Ryerson, Elizabeth
James with Vancouver’s North Shore News and the blogger at the Sixth Estate
who wrote about How media
should handle a plagiarism scandal
Why were the Globe and Mail’s ethics and standards being
called into question? In a nutshell, several columns by Globe and Mail
columnist Margaret Wente had been scrutinized by an Ottawa artist and
professor, Carol Wainio in her Media Culpa blog. Over several years, Media
Culpa posted comparisons of older text by other authors to the text in some
of Wente’s columns. Wainio made several of these comparisons. Wente’s columns
made no attributions or reference to this other work, and strings of words were
identical.
What made it possible for everyone to weigh in with an
opinion, was that the Media Culpa’s blogs provided similar comparisons if text to
those produced by plagiarism software, such as Turnitin.com. With Turnitin
output reports, side-by-side text comparisons are made. Every course director
and teaching assistant must make a judgment about these Turnitin text reports,
and decide what to tolerate in terms of the cutting and pasting of text. There will
be a process for taking this up with students whose work is identified in this
way.
The response that unfolded to Media Culpa’s posts, which
Wainio had conveyed on several occasions to the Globe and Mail, was that various
editors and columnists (including Wente herself) defended
a position on plagiarism in which a certain amount cutting and pasting of text
written by someone else is to be expected and accepted. Reasons for
downplaying Wainio’s text comparisons included the pressures
of meeting deadlines. A number of well known writers in “old media”, aka
the mainstream press defended Wente. Some of them expressed the opinion that
upholding the standards and principles of “academic” plagiarism, or the
standards taught in university and high school, was just too difficult. The Wente
apologists included Terence Corcoran and Dan Delmar at the National Post. Back
at the Globe and Mail, the editor, John Stackhouse and the public editor,
Sylvia Stead provided very muted and restrained responses, only after torrents
of internet chatter ensured that the story did not die down.
Is cutting and pasting
so unavoidable, so that we are we all guilty of using other peoples’ phrases
and sentences?
Some members of the reading public seem to think so. Jack,
commented at the crux
of the matter blog: “So she quoted without naming sources. I rarely do.
Does that make me a plagiarist? “Sloppy journalism”? Disagree. If that were
true we would all be guilty but we aren’t are we?”
The title of Dan Delmar’s column at the National Post was:
Are
we all “self-righteous” sinners cast(ing) the first stone at Margaret Wente?
My answer to this is a definite “no”. Biology laboratory reports provide a
good case study for evaluating just how prevalent cutting and pasting actually
is. Hundreds of student do the same experiments every year, and write up their
results. Up to to now, thousands of these reports have been run through plagiarism
software such as Turnitin. This software checks for patterns in words, and
compares one person’s text against that from other sources: the internet, other
student papers, journals, and whatever other text is available and accessible.
The Turnitin reports shows that it IS possible for thousands
of students to write up the same experiment with relatively little overlap in
sentence structure. The one exception is the methods section, in which students
often quote directly from the laboratory manual, and it has been easy to put
guidelines into place for quoting them.
Nevertheless, IS the
academic integrity project in jeopardy?
There may be a very real case for arguing that different
kinds of writers should be held to different standards, but there is no doubt
in my mind that if Margaret Wente had submitted the columns in which Wainio
detected unattributed text as undergraduate assignments, that she would have
been called in for a chat with the teaching assistant and course director. Not
surprisingly, a US Gallup poll found that journalists
aren’t high on the public’s honesty list.
While the entire affair raised serious questions about the
ethical behavior of powerful members of “old media”, in general, I tend to
agree with the Back of the Book blog, that there has been an upside
to the Wente case.
Good pedagogy includes raising awareness about the rules of
academic integrity and plagiarism. Academic integrity is not primarily about
punishment but about learning how not to plagiarize, and give credit
appropriately. Many of the frontline workers, such as grad
student blogger, gradstudentdrone, in the war on cut and paste have stepped
forward during l’affaire Wente, to acknowledge the challenges, and the grey
areas of confronting plagiarism.
The reader responses have shown that these principles and
ethical codes relating to academic integrity are taken very seriously by many
outside of academia and the media. Being able to view the text comparisons
directly, was no doubt a contributing factor to the outrage at the behavior of
senior editors, and the picture that their actions paint of the corporate
culture. Carol Wainio wrote several responses on her blog and in the mainstream
media that were calm, measured and logical. This all served to reinforce
the impression that a section of the media establishment has been making judgment
calls that put them out of line with teachers, readers and members
of the mainstream media who are more apt to look at the evidence without
blinking. Kathy English, the Toronto Star’s public editor described the Wente
case as a test
of accountability.
Perhaps the most positive outcome is the broad discussion that
the Wente story generated. A very cool example is the discussion thread about
this on the Vancouver
Canucks Hockey team forum. Thank goodness the fans have something to
distract them. This incident also gave many people cause for reflection and
rememberance, such as David Climenhaga’s raising the tragic case of Toronto
Star journalist Ken Adachi,
who committed suicide after being found plagiarizing.
Dawn Bazeley
Image by Jobadge. Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence
