Plagiarism, journalistic ethics ... and climate change?

One of the big ethics stories blowing up in Canada right now concerns plagiarism and journalistic ethics. Namely, criticisms of a journalist at one of the big national papers here, The Globe and Mail, have gone viral leaving the paper, and the journalist concerned, Margaret Wente, with a serious case to answer. Many, ourselves included, have been underwhelmed by the response of the paper to what is an extremely serious threat to their legitimacy. As regular readers will know, we are pretty serious about plagiarism, as are most academics.In fact, one of our colleagues here at York, Dawn Bazely, who heads up the Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability, was so riled by the case that yesterday she posted a blog piece on the scandal. With her agreement, we're re-posting it here, since we think it makes an interesting contribution to the debate from an academic perspective. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 SCENE: Kitchen, writing student references for medical schools, while CBC’s As It Happens plays on the radio.

JEFF DOUGLAS (As It Happens radio broadcoaster):

“”Media Culpa.” That’s the name of a blog maintained by Ottawa artist Carol Wainio. As the name suggests, the blog exposes what Ms. Wainio believes to be substandard journalism. Lately, her spotlight has been focusing on one Canadian journalist in particular: Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente.

On Friday, the Globe’s Public Editor, Sylvia Stead, responded to some of the issues raised by Ms Wainio. Ms. Stead included an explanation from Ms. Wente. But Carol Wainio isn’t satisfied, and neither is John Miller.

He’s the founding Chair of Ryerson University’s Journalism Department and professor emeritus. We reached Mr. Miller in Port Hope, Ontario.” (from The Monday Edition of As It Happens, duration 7 mins 49 secs)

DAWN BAZELY: “What the heck?” To my family hanging around doing homework and reading the Globe and Mail: ”Did you hear that?”

Yes, we heard it and after the interview with Prof. Miller (starting at minute 13:25 of the podcast), I read many of the blogs and the Globe and Mail articles about the plagiarism. The Globe and Mail admitted to some of what Carol Wainio has been documenting, though did not call it plagiarism. It culminated, this morning, in my sending a Letter to the Editor of the Globe and Mail explaining that until a transparent and public investigation takes place to restore my faith in their journalistic standards and practices, that I would be cancelling my online and print subscriptions. Too bad, because I am a huge fan of Lucy Waverman’s recipes, and my lobbying to get her back to the Saturday Life section from the mid-week section appeared to have borne fruit.

What does this debacle at the Globe and Mail have to do with Climate Change? A lot, actually (more on that in a moment).

It also has to do with how universities deal with ethics and academic integrity, including plagiarism. York University students are required to read the Academic Integrity webpages and do the tutorial about it. At York, I was one of the first professors to use Turnitin plagiarism software, because I brought in a lot of written work into BIOL 2050 (Ecology). Course instructors and teaching assistants spend a huge amount of their time educating about and policing academic honesty and making sure that plagiarism is not happening and if something is flagged as being potential plagiarism, filing complaints, holding meetings with associate deans and students involved, and then doing any follow up remedial work. There are large chunks of my life spent with tearful, upset students, that I will never ever get back.

So to read that a very public and polarizing columnist who has been given many board-feet of column space in what Chris Selley of the National Post describes in an online post as Canada’s “self-styled paper of record” is not only being questioned about possible plagiarism and that several instances of this have been raised in the past by Carol Wainio (you can read the comparisons of the text – they are all over the internet), but then to see the muted responses from the Globe’s Public Editor, and the Editor, made me feel utterly dismayed. THIS IS SERIOUS! In our courses, this would get students called into meetings, and if it continued (as appears to be have been happening), there would be a ramped up response and penalties imposed – severe penalties. Chris Selley quite rightly went on to observe that the Globe’s response “is completely out of keeping with the global journalism mainstream“.

I have written about the challenges of consistent blogging about sustainability, because of the time that I feel ethically obliged to spend checking sources, referencing and inserting links into posts, so as to maintain the standards that I am supposed to uphold as an academic. I get freaked out about accuracy and attribution. Apparently the Globe and Mail doesn’t see this as such a big issue.

And finally, climate change… It’s simply that Margaret Wente’s many columns on climate change, sustainability, energy, etc. indicate that she is happy to give a big shout out to skeptics and denialists and generally is not interested in considering the boring old scientific community in a respectful, (even semi-) balanced and informed dialogue. Furthermore, a number of her columns about about the environment have contained errors through omission – exactly one of the reasons for academic dishonesty charges being levelled against Bjorn Lomborg, himself a controversial climate skeptic – then believer – nowunfunded. I gave up reading Wente a long time ago after realizing that any time spent analyzing and responding was a total waste. The people now defending Wente in the comments section of the Globe and Mail appear to be supporting her because she speaks to their cultural beliefs and for them, uncomfortable facts are really not going to be that important (aka cognitive dissonance). A couple of years ago, the Globe and Mail actually did publish a response by Gerald Butts of WWF Canada to one of Wente’s anti-climate change screeds.

So, here I go – a bit of analysis and observation of a couple of Wente columns:

From a December 1st 2011 column, “Suppression of climate debate is a disaster for science”

“Instead of distancing themselves from the shenanigans, the broader climate-science community has treated the central figures in Climategate like persecuted heroes. That is a terrible mistake, because it erodes the credibility of the entire field. The suppression of legitimate debate is a catastrophe for climate science. It’s also a catastrophe for science, period.” (M. Wente)

Sorry – but the climate scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit were cleared ofmalpractice allegations, as reported by the Guardian on April 14 2010 in an inquiry headed by Lord Oxburgh. More of the same hacked emails were put out there after the inquiry had finished, by the denialists – but Wente doesn’t mention the Oxburgh inquiry results anywhere, as far as I can tell – though she does consistently say that the science of climate change is not settled. NOT TRUE! Surely the Globe could have afforded to send her to any one of the International Polar Year conferences held in Quebec.

And  in the same column, Wente cites an economics professor on the topic of climate science: “Ross McKitrick… at the University of Guelph who is a leading climate-science critic” A quick check of McKitrick’s publications on Google Scholar, indicates that he publishes papers about the lack of evidence for climate change with a co-author Patrick J. Michaels of the libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute, Washington, D. C. Hmm – wonder who funds them? – oh, that billionaire, Koch.

Previously, Wente had covered Climategate in a column, ”Climate science’s PR disaster“ in which someone called Steve McIntyre a skeptic and “anarchist” was heavily referenced. He has recently published a journal paper confirming  climate change in Antarctica, but this is his only peer-reviewed paper – his other writing is on his blog page.

The problem with these two columns is that Wente is conflating peer-reviewed and non-peer reviewed writing. There is a whole field that considers academic and funder bias (but it’s not really ever mentioned by Wente).

I could go on picking Wente’s biased writing apart, but it’s pointless. She has sold many papers with this approach, and gets a lot of clicks on the internet. Except, that I cannot resist pointing out the irony of a June 14 column supporting fracking in which she’s actually calling for science: “I’m no expert on fracking technology, and I’m in no position to evaluate the risks. I have to rely on experts for that.” She fails to point out that there is research ongoing into this issue and a lot of concern about fracking. Yes, the research investigating the downsides of fracking is in its infancy, and there’s not much published on it, but Wente has never shied away from featuring the opinions of poorly-published people.

It really is time for the “legacy media“, as I have learned it is called, to step up to the plate and deal substantively with the allegations against Margaret Wente. This would at the very least, include running all of her writing through Turnitin or some other plagiarism software.

Dawn Bazely

Photo by smallestbones. Reproduced under Creative Commons licence

Lunch at IKEA

Copyright Kai Hendry

Shopping on an empty stomach is not fun. Especially if its shopping for something a little more sophisticated, such as furniture. No wonder than IKEA, the Swedish budget furniture chain, runs restaurants in all its locations. I had a chance to check one out last Saturday. Well, that is, in the end I didn’t.

Copyright Kai Hendry

I have never eaten at IKEA but as my 11-month old baby daughter needed her food anyway, and we were just about to enter the store, we thought we might as well check it out. Nothing had prepared us though for what was going on there. There were two massive lines the size of a check in line for a intercontinental flight and I would estimate that there were at least 500 people in the restaurant. Families with kids, grandmother and dog were queuing up next to young couples or groups of teenagers, old single men as well as people in wheelchairs. It was an amazing mix.

Copyright rayb777

Given the size of the lines and the prospective waiting time we quickly folded the idea of lunch and just fed the baby with what we had with us. The IKEA lunch line though was an exciting spectacle to watch for a few minutes. The food looked actually quite good, though it was rather simple. Meat-and-two-veg seemed to be the general structure. And generous portions. It was cheap: none of the items is more than $7.99 with the legendary Meatball staple at $5.99. It also looked relatively healthy. Only two of the seven main dishes on offer contained fries or deep fried stuff; most had vegetables or salad as sides; and the pasta and crepes were even organic! No junk food this.

It is kind of funny when sitting in the restaurant of a multinational chain you suddenly get the feeling of being more in a public institution – the place looked like the hospital or school canteens of my youth or the university ‘mensa’ of my student days. The entire place had more something of an institutional air around it rather than a ‘restaurant’. Underlined by the demographics of the dining public this appeared more like a social institution than a privately run for-profit restaurant. It even reminded me a little bit of a public soup kitchen or red cross food outlets which I saw when visiting refugee camps in the aftermath of the Yugoslavian wars in the mid 1990s.

Now the peculiar thing here is that all this was not only provided by an otherwise known as a ruthless, efficient and profit driven multinational corporation. Even more, it was just because IKEA has this ultimate modern perfection of a Fordist business model with globally standardized sourcing, products, and processes that the company is able to offer this affordable food supply. I was reminded of investigations in the mid 2000s in Germany which found that IKEA had become the food supplier of choice for people on welfare and low incomes. At the time, the company already made 10% of its revenue in Germany just by food!

Matten jr. enjoyed herself at IKEA

It leaves one wondering about the status and nature of global capitalism. In some ways, IKEA represents this approach like few others. Some scholars have argued that IKEA though, shaped by the social-democratic climate of his home country Sweden represents a somewhat softer or human form of a global corporation. But just skimming the IKEA page on Wikipedia shows that the company is anything but a saint. I well remember that, when the wall came down in 1989 in Germany, some former dissidents had a funny déjà-vu when visiting their relatives in the West for the first time: they could recognize some of their friends’ IKEA furniture as items they had to assemble while being imprisoned by the regime in Eastern Germany which supplied IKEA with some of their phenomenally cheap products...

For me, the company just represents, first of all, the ascent and the degree to which private corporations shape the public and private sphere of ordinary people these days. After all, one out of ten Europeans these days is said to having been conceived in an IKEA bed. It also shows, secondly, that at least from a consumer perspective in the Global North a multinational such as IKEA contributes significantly to enhancing the standard of living and providing affordable access to basic necessities of life. But most of all, it raises some growing and unresolved questions about the status of the social sphere in a world where markets and capitalism seem to colonize every last corner of our lives. No student at my current university has access to cheap food at IKEA prices; and many of the ‘common’ folks I saw last Saturday at IKEA certainly know that taking the family out for a meal anywhere else would probably be beyond their budget. The last time I saw a meal service in a Toronto hospital it was just outright revolting junk served in a public institution. But why is it only a ruthless, self-interested multinational which provides a better alternative at that level today?

I have not doubts about the motivations of IKEA in running such a restaurant operation. I am just puzzled by the fact that the result resembles so much what traditionally looked like the public provision of these goods. This said, I am not even sure if I want to add: this should still be available for common folks, be it in schools, universities, hospitals or even worker’s canteens in companies. But I also know why IKEA can and these other players cannot provide this any more...

DM

Top three fotos reproduced under the Creative Commons License

Mitt is on the money

It is final now: Mitt Romney is the official presidential candidate of the Republican Party for 2012.  This is in itself a little miracle. To begin with, given the strength of Christian fundamentalists in the GOP – from Evangelicals to Catholics – it is still remarkable that a Mormon has finally made it to the top of the ticket. Given the history of Mormonism in the US and its longstanding antagonism from ‘mainstream’ Christian groups this is probably the clearest indicator of the magnitude of resentment towards Obama. To Tea Party fundamentalists, even an apostate is more acceptable than – I guess – a black person in the White House. Those two delegates who threw nuts at a black CNN camerawoman with the comment "this is how we feed the animals" are probably – despite the political correctness of the official reaction - just an indicator of the Republican Zeitgeist.

There is though another reason why this is even more interesting. After all, this is the first election where private corporations (or rich business owners through their companies) are able to basically fund the campaigns of their preferred candidates without any limits. We saw this clearly in the primaries, where candidates such as Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum were all able to stay in the race far beyond what their paltry successes in the primaries would traditionally suggest. It was ironic, that the Citizens United ruling by a Republican-leaning Supreme Court in 2010 reared its predictably ugly head first to the detriment of the Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney himself. Newt Gingrich was probably the best example: not only did his philandering past made him unpalatable for even the most ideological GOP supporters at the base, but also his success in the primaries was dismal –he could not even win his home state Georgia. He stayed in the race though because his ‘sugardaddy’ Sheldon Adelson poured limitless amounts of cash into his campaign. Adelson, the owner of a global Casino empire, is currently investigated for breach of the Foreign- and Corrupt Practices Act by the US Justice Authorities and has good reasons to make sure whoever ends up in the White House has some loyalties to him.

The Republican primaries have shown that rich individuals, after the Citizens United ruling, basically can buy elections. It will be exciting to watch how this will now impact the presidential campaigns in the fall in the US. Mind you, four years ago it was Obama who had the biggest coffers. And still today, if one just analyzes the funds of the actual campaigns of Obama and Romney, where donations are capped at $5,000, Obama is still leading Romney (according to a recent report in The New Yorker). However, what the Citizen United ruling has allowed is the creation of so called ‘Super PACs’ (as in political action committee), which can advertise on behalf and in the interest of a candidate and can accept unlimited amounts of donations.

The effect is fairly impressive. Already now, if we look at the Super PACs around both candidates, Romney with $120m in donations leads Obama by factor four. Adelson alone has pledged $100m to get rid of Obama and other rich republican donors such as the Koch brothers are willing to donate whatever it takes. Estimates suggest that Romney (and his entourage) by November may have been able to spent some mindboggling $1.2bn dollars!

The interesting thing here then is that for some reasons, the Obama campaign is not playing the same game. This not so much due to a lack of potential donors (according to the cited article); there are enough rich business people who are leaning towards the Democrats. It appears that Obama himself is not too keen on becoming too close and dependant from wealthy individuals and interests. Another factor appears also to be that some of the individuals who potentially could play the game of the Koch’s and Adelsons’ on the other side feel that this trend in politics is not desirable: “I don’t want to see democracy go in that direction”, Warren Buffett (a longstanding Obama supporter) is quoted in The New Yorker.

There are many people among the Democrats who are worried about this. After all, come fall it may well be possible that most advertising time on TV and radio has already been bought by Republican Super-PACs. And indeed, as we have frequently discussed here on this blog, the current situation in the US lifts the entire debate of corporate influence on the political process to a truly new level. There is now only a little and mostly cosmetic difference between how ‘third world’ dictators can buy elections and the way the sheer financial backing of a candidate and his capacity to spend on his campaign will decide the US Presidential election.

The Republican primaries though have left us with a glimmer of hope – albeit in a somewhat twisted way. After all, despite the corporate backers of several candidates, in the end the Republican base by persistently not voting, for instance for Gingrich, finally got to speak the last word. The assumption that money can buy an election then rests on a simple assumption: that the majority of the electorate, in fact: the few millions of swing voters in some ten states of the US who effectively have decided elections in the last decades are stupid enough to fall for a bombardment of advertising (for which most of the funds are used these days) and just succumb to these formidable means of manipulation. Or is it still also true, as the Republican base has shown, that voters still have some minimal set of convictions and the ability to see through all the veneer of a political campaign – and decide for themselves. One way or the other, these specific circumstances have added an ingredient to this presidential campaign which might actually make it a slightly more interesting spectacle to watch.

Artwork from DonkeyHotey, reproduced under the Creative Commons License.

Are Americans working too much?

With many people currently enjoying or looking forward to their summer holidays it is sobering to consider some of the differences in expectation that workers in different countries will have about how much paid time off they can enjoy. Statutory minimum leave varies enormously by country, from zero days in the US, through to 5 working days in China, 10 working days in Canada, and all the way up to 25 working days plus public holidays in countries like Denmark and Norway. Of course, variations in legislated minimums give plenty of scope for more explicit CSR type policies in low-regulation countries such as the US, but even looking at the average leave taken across countries, Scandinavia and most of Europe far outpace North America. Sure, a lot of the talk now is about Americans not having enough jobs, but another way of looking at it is maybe some Americans are simply working too much.

We have been interested in debates about working hours, flexible work arrangements, forced overtime and the like for some time. In the first two editions of our Business Ethics textbook we included cases on young professionals and excessive working hours.  In the most recent 3rd edition, this changed to a case about forced labor, which is a related but quite different issue. These are complicated problems, especially when much of the excessive hours worked by professionals is, in principle, voluntary. Even in sweatshops, some argue that workers choose to work long hours for low pay, because it is better than the alternative - which is no job and no pay.

Anyway, arriving in the inbox today was a nice infographic from onlinemba.com, the fruits of whose labors we've featured before in our survey of the best and worst corporate responsibility infographics. It tells an interesting, and well documented, story of the problems of excessive working hours in the US. We're not sure the call for a return of a 40 hour week will be heeded in the current climate, but it certainly helps start an important conversation. And with many in the CSR world apparently uninterested in working hours in the developed world as a relevant topic, it provides a decent business case for changing that perspective.




Infographic source: OnlineMBA.com
Photo by LaPrimaDonna. Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence

Who really should resign for the Barclays interest rate scandal?

The banking sector needs another scandal like a hole in the head. Or maybe that's the wrong metaphor. Because a quick death from a headshot might be more preferable to the excruciating, but likely never fatal, torture of interminable crises that we seem to be constantly enduring.

The latest bout of banking misery comes from the UK, where Barclays, the retail and investment banking giant has fallen foul of regulators for manipulating the interbank interest rate over a number of years during the mid 2000s.  It's a huge scandal that looks set to engulf not just Barclays, but potentially also a slew of other banks, and even maybe the Bank of England and the UK Government.

One of the more interesting facets has been the reaction from Barclays. What a week it has been. First a number of senior executives including the CEO Bob Diamond reacted to the media criticism by announcing they would forgo their bonuses. Then, as the scandal escalated, the Barclays Chairman, Marcus Agius announced his resignation. In a dramatic turnaround, the following day Agius was reinstated and CEO Diamond announced his resignation, along with his right hand man, Jerry del Missier.

So the big question is: who really should go in a scandal like this? The Chairman, the CEO, or someone else? The answer, of course, depends on the type of scandal, the level of knowledge of the activity that the senior leadership had (or should of had) as the events unfolded, the likely best route to reform, and of course the likely reaction of stakeholders. With Barclays it seems right that Agius, the Chairman, has (on second thoughts) decided to stay. The Board is unlikely to know about an activity such as the interest rate rigging, and so cannot be held culpable in their overseeing function. It is different from, say, the role of the Board in something like Enron's accounting fraud, which is directly related to the Board's role, and relates to accounts that they must have seen and approved.

With Barclays, you would expect the Board and its Chairman to take a central role in dealing with the problem once it has been revealed to them, which apparently was only days ago. As one member of the House of Lords scathingly remarked upon Agius's resignation: "The board is so hopeless they've just shot the head of the firing squad and missed the prisoner." By resigning Agius was signalling that the Board was unfit to be a "firing squad" and instigate the kind of change necessary at the bank.

Turning to Diamond, one of the main reasons forwarded for his resignation has been the "lightening rod" argument, as in the UK newspaper, The Guardian's analysis: "Diamond, under pressure from the banking regulator and the governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King, quit after he decided he would be the lightning rod for the scandal at the hearing".

It's not the first time we have heard this argument about the resignation of a prominent CEO in recent times;  News International made exactly the same claim regarding the departure of CEO Rebekah Brooks in July last year in the wake of the phone hacking scandal.

Why the lightening rod argument? Well, it enables the CEO to continue to proclaim their innocence, despite stepping down. Their resignation is not due to guilt but is to save their firm from excessive media and political criticism. The idea is that it is supposed to diffuse the storm of negative publicity - the brave leader falling on their sword to save the company.

The problem, which we saw with News International, and which is already happening with Barclays, is that it doesn't really work.  For a start, no one really believes the argument. So the media is just as likely to respond by digging even deeper expecting there to be more secrets that the company is trying to hide by jettisoning the CEO.  Secondly, even if you get rid of one lightening rod, the critics will readily find another .... or they will simply continue targeting the same one in the hope of more revelations. Barclays found this to their cost last week after lightening rod no.1, Agius quit, only to be replaced by lightening rod no.2, Diamond. As The Telegraph put it: "Mr Agius is thought to have hoped his departure would serve as a lightning rod to conduct anger away from the bank and Mr Diamond". No chance.

It seems in this instance Diamond was responding primarily to pressure from politicians and to a lesser extent shareholders. Numerous influential voices were calling for the CEOs resignation and it is no coincidence that the Barclays share price rose on the announcement of Diamond's departure, despite him being up until recently strongly supported by investors. In other words, Diamond's resignation was primarily a symbolic act to appease stakeholders.

This is all very well, especially at a time when trust in big banks is at an all time low. But it is not necessarily the best course of action for actually dealing with the root problem. Mind you, the root problem is not 100% clear at the moment. Whilst Diamond was blaming "a small minority", others were were laying the blame at the culture at the bank or even of the entire sector. So although Diamond's proposed solution  - to “get to the bottom of what happened”, punish those involved, enhance internal controls, and change the bank's culture - may on the face of it make sense, this scandal has all the hallmarks of a more deep-seated systemic problem.

One bank and one CEO can't change an entire sector, especially when no one, not even the guy that's resigning, seems willing to take personal responsibility. Did he symbolise a culture that needed changing, Diamond was asked today. "I don't think so at all," he replied. Institutions like the banking industry are based on taken for granted assumptions that are highly resistant to change. Symbolic resignations are not the answer. But maybe they are a start.

Photo by SomeDriftwood. Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence