This Really Happened

This is a telephone conversation with the Charlotte Sun newspaper's e-subscription person:

CS: That will be $31.74.
OWW: No, that would be $29.94.
CS: Well, there's sales tax.
OWW: But Florida does not tax electronic subscriptions.
CS: Well, we feel we should collect sales tax on electronic subscriptions.
OWW: But the newspaper is not empowered to determine what is taxed.
CS: I know. But we feel we should collect it.

News From the Time Warp Edition ....

Christmas comes early. 
No it doesn't.

The festival commemorates 500 years of Florida history since the arrival of the Spanish  conquistadors.
The first conquistador in  Florida, Juan Ponce de Leon, arrived in the summer of 1513, so the celebration is about two years too soon.

"Feeling Fit's" cover last week said it was Sunday, October 3, 2011.

Silly Sunday: Wrong Organ. Wrong Expert. Wrong Name.

Kicking off an article about intestinal disease with a quote that likens a child to a stomach is bizarre. Selecting that quote from among words attributed to a silent-film era screen writer ("Fighting Buckaroo," 1926) is more bizarre. Rendering the quoted man's name as Frank A. Clark when it's Frank Howard Clark, is most bizarre.

And bizarrest of all, no editor noticed, even when the second graf announced: ...

And diverticulosis, which affects your stomach ... No, it doesn't.

As a general rule, this disease afflicts adults after 40 and is rare in children. So why mention children in the lede?

No editor bothered to check how much the new byline relies on Wikipedia's wording -- dutifully attributed not to the source but to the local doctor:

... the diagnosis of diverticulosis generally is made as an incidental finding during other investigations. A good patient history, he said [Wikipedia said], is often sufficient to form a diagnosis of diverticulosis or diverticulitis. If there is an onset of pain, cramps, bloating, changes in bowel movement, diarrhea, constipation and nonspecific chronic discomfort in the lower abdomen, it may be that the person suffers from inflammation and abscesses, [the local doctor] explained.

Layers of Integrity

Writing for publication requires integrity.  In ninth and tenth grade classrooms, the first layer of integrity is taught in a straightforward manner:  If you copy stuff, you have to say who you copied from.  In J-School, another layer of integrity is added: Identify news and information sources so readers can fairly evaluate the reporting.

In post-grad and professional schools, such as those attended by Licensed Clinical Social Workers, a couple more layers of integrity accrue: Professionals in positions of trust identify sources in order to demonstrate professional integrity with regard to their research and the work of their colleagues. When they're in position to dispense quasi-medical advice, they carry an additional, special burden of integrity.  Readers will, rightly or wrongly, tend to rely on the letters after their names as an indicator of their expertise -- and integrity.

Thus it's triply sad that Barbara Pierce, who claims to be a retired Licensed Clinical Social Worker, once again, betrays her readers, editors and publishers by plagiarizing substantial parts of her reporting  in the regional newspaper. In today's edition of The Charlotte Sun's Sunday tab, "Feeling Fit," Pierce's by line appears at the top of an item about traumatic events.  In it, she writes: "When bad things happen, it can take awhile to get over the pain and feel safe again."

But Pierce didn't write it.  Including the grammar error that Pierce didn't fix, it's word for word from a webpage anchored with ads and sporting a thin river of "content" down the middle called "Healing Emotional and Psychological Trauma." Readers can see it live at  Help Guide Dot Org Website.

Pierce's article in the Charlotte Sun goes on:   "Upsetting emotions, frightening memories, being easily startled, a sense of constant danger that doesn't go away. Or you may feel numb, disconnected and unable to trust each other."  Compare her sentence with Help Guide:  "You may be struggling with upsetting emotions, frightening memories, or a sense of constant danger that you just can't kick.  Or you may feel numb, disconnected, and unable to trust other people."  (It's not terribly important but for some reason, Pierce feels the need to change the websites' full-sentence copy into sentence fragments, editing acceptable 10th grade sentence structure to substandard English that wouldn't pass the state's FCAT exam.)

Pierce visits another another website over at Find Articles dot com * in order to plagiarize the nugget, "Some people are born with the ability to bounce back.  Experts promise that those of us who were not born with with ability can learn the skills to carry us through the tough times."  The same site also yields a quote from a Texas researcher.  Old World Wolf will wager a substantial amount that Pierce did not speak to that researcher herself but simply inserted a quote attributed to "Roberta Greene, Ph.D." without without having verified or actually spoken to the person. 

* Or Shape Fitness, an on-line magazine:

_______________________________

On a more cheerful note: A crash blossom worthy of  TCE's longest-ever thread filled in the lower right corner of Saturday's Charlotte Sun:

Nostalgia

Ranks up there with vinyl and vaudeville.

Nature PhotoShopped

An insect is the best local photojournalism the kids on the copy desk could find for yesterday's local front.

The image has been so badly "Photoshopped" that a cloud of wormy indigo swirls billow around the subject. A heavy doodle line outlines the dragonfly itself, evidence that the image has been manipulated -- so amateurishly that a reasonably alert photo editor would notice.

Anything that might give context -- the who, what, when, where that a photo in a newspaper is expected to convey -- has been diligently erased for reasons that are never shared with the newspaper reader -- you know, the ones who pay more than $400 a year for honestly presented information?

The whole effort is a fake, intended to mislead and misinform. It's not even a "pretty picture."

Quoting People We Didn't Speak to and Anonymous Sources

The Arcadian editorial writer leads with the shop-worn announcement: “There are many strange laws contained within Florida statutes,” and helpfully adds, “including one within the Florida Constitution ...”

Ignoring the technicality that the constitution does not contain statutes, readers are whisked directly to the news that a state representative (from a district 200 miles east and north) wants to repeal a statute regarding cohabitation. The editorial never again mentions the other lead about the strange statute, “the one within the Florida Constitution.”

To which we will return in a moment. The editorial presents problems larger than mere incompleteness and incoherence.

The news that Ritch Workman (R-Melbourne) wants to repeal an antiquated cohabitation law went up over at the Sun Sentinel website in mid-afternoon, August 31. That report contains all the quotes (and facts) the Arcadian editorial relies on without one word of attribution.

Frankly, we believe the editor copied -- an act often called plagiarism -- the Sun-Sentinel reporter’s quote from Dennis Baxley.

The belief is based on two inferences.

The first inference is identical wording. Speakers don’t normally use the exact wording they used three weeks ago. If the wording comes from press release, Arcadian editors neglected their professional and ethical duty to say so.

The second inference is the unimaginable likelihood that the local Sun-Herald/Arcadian writer contacted the state lawmaker from Ocala, soliciting comment on a bill filed by the lawmaker from Melbourne in order to write an editorial enlightening Arcadia’s good readers about a capitol kerfuffle in a congress that is out-of-session until early 2012.

After finishing with the plagiarism, the editorial writer goes on to explain the editorial's brave "maybe-maybe not" position rests on not one but two anonymous sources.

The Arcadian editorial quotes “a prominent defense attorney,” but never names him or her. It quotes “a local radio DJ,” but never names him or her.

So, the evidence of plagiarism, of quoting people not actually interviewed, reliance on anonymous sources -- what's left? Oh, yes, that statute contained "within" the state constitution. Although the editorial writer can't be bothered to identify the allusion, one might infer a reference to Article 10, Section 21 requiring the humane treatment of pregnant pigs.

Obit Noir: The Fitting Death

And on the next page ...

Sunday Double Feature: Where the Money Goes and That's Not What Wikipedia Says

"Scientists have isloated a viral gene that induces zombie-like behavior in caterpillars. The virus causes gypsy moth caterpillars to climb to the tops of trees, where they die and their disintegrating bodies rain infectious particles on their unsuspecting brethren below."

Monday Bits and Pieces

A Charlotte Sun senior editor and occasional columnist likes to compile lists of unanswered questions and call it a day's work. OWW thought it would be fun to do the same.

Starting at the bottom: Why is The Journal of Lake Placid running a political cartoon, "Anchors Away," that comments on a story about a motor-boat club on a lake in Springfield, Ill.? (Just to be clear, LP's in Florida. But then, it does have "lake" in its name.)

Why wasn't the almost-last observation, "... the two mediums said psychic ability depended on a healthy imagination ..." the lede in Jen Wulf's story, "A trip to the supernatural side"?

Why didn't a copy editor read David Morris' consumer column before pasting in this morning's irrelevant headline? The report is about the newest victim in the perennial duct-cleaning-and-mold-detection scam. That is not even remotely similar to the perennial too-good-to-be-true story that the kids-in-charge decided would fit.

Second from the top of the side bar: Did the copy desk kids and the file-foto tweens use different templates last night?

And finally, regarding the A1 Top Story: Why didn't anyone notice either of the misplaced modifiers or the missing plural inflection in the fourth sentence of Josh Salman's story about millionaire Republicans elected to the state house? While they made most of their money before being elected to public office, a growing number of local Democrats fear the conservatives have lost touch with the best interest of the region's middle class -- safe-guarding tax breaks for the wealthy on the backs of average workers.

Or its continuation: They point to controversial Gov. Rick Scott as an example of how politics and money can be a dangerous combination. No, "they" don't. Nowhere in the story does the antecedent of "they" point to what the sentence says is being pointed to. The reporter is the only person in the story to mention the governor's name.

Three out of Four Writers Did Not Plagiarize in "Feeling Fit" This Week

Charlotte Sun's "Feeling Fit" tab editor Karin Lillis and SCMG publishers have made it clear: In their shop, plagiarists get second and third chances. Three of their bylines (George, Marlow and Pierce) appear in this week's edition over their newest stories. Since OWW is occasionally accused of never saying anything nice, let the record show that we note, endorse and praise this accomplishment: "Nice work, ladies: You each wrote a story without plagiarizing." I'll be happy to repeat this every time it happens, so stay tuned.

Despite the rehabilitation of three past plagiarists (Once again, "Good work, gals!"), the title of this post should be "Here We Go Again."

Anyone reading "Combating Peripheral Neuropathy" in today's paper will easily detect an extraordinary shift in the last four paragraphs. Pronoun errors suddenly evaporate, dangling modifiers disappear, subject-verb faults go away, and the section is punctuation perfect.

The local editor didn't correct any of the fundamental errors in the copy's main body, so it is safe to assume that detecting a style and focus shift would be too subtle and also escape notice. But the sudden improvement in the copy's quality is notable for another reason.

The notable reason is the paragraphs were written over a year ago by a different writer, polished by a different editor, and published in a different magazine. At "Feeling Fit," the plagiarism continues.

Today's appearance of this and several other local items riddled with typos, common syntax faults and basic grammatical errors suggests that at SCMG, the title of "editor" is a pay grade, not a job description that has anything to do with making copy meet basic FCAT standards.

File Foto Editor Missed This One

The Charlotte Sun's front page file art this morning is an iPhone. The anonymous thumb points readers to the message: YAWNIEbee_FACTzRT @Masturbate2Me I hate when people tell me I don't have a butt

Plagiarism Diet: A Dash of Internet Copy Salts Dietitian's Feature

There's not much left to say when posting Sun Coast Media Group's 80th plagiarism tag in 48 months, an average of about one failure every two weeks or so in just this one sector of journalism's ethics canon. The editors at Charlotte Sun's weekly tab, "Feeling Fit," don't seem to get it: Writers who plagiarize are unethical and not in a position to be advising anyone about anything.

Internet Peril: Repeating the Errors of Others

The problem with being the resident aw-shucks-ma'am, I'm just the "hometown editor" is that there's no one to edit your copy. If Mat Delaney at The Journal of Lake Placid could scare up an actual copy editor, that discerning eye might help him spell Warren Buffett's name correctly, point out that via the miracles of syntax he has Buffett interviewing himself, and the website he copied with only the barest of attribution has key facts wrong.

The interview Delaney is trying to reference is dated July 7, not July 8 as his source says. Delaney's source seems to be a Website for Dennis Tubbergen, who also misspells Buffett's name. Tubbergen attributes his misdated information to an interview by Alex Crippen. The interview was actually conducted by Becky Quick on CNBC's Squawk Box

Then there's the odd juxtaposition of Tubbergen's suggestion that his personal suggestion to reduce the nation's deficit is a spending reduction that is the "approximate size of the Social Security program and Medicare program combined." But Delaney, after quoting Tubbergen on the details, says he wants lawmakers to "keep their fingers away from Social Security and Medicare." (We'll overlook that the approximation the financial wizard tosses out is low by $4 billion, according to data maintained by the Congressional Budget Office).

Old Word Wolf isn't sure where Mat Delaney dug up Dennis Tubbergen, who claims in a grammatically challenged and weasel-worded "about page" that he lives in West, Michigan, a town we cannot find on a map. Tubbergen claims to be the CEO of a "wealth transfer company," and lists wife and daughters among his professional credentials, but makes no mention of college study, academic degrees, or nationally recognized certificates such as C.P.A. or similar.

OWW brings up all this only to suggest that whenever the "hometown editor" has to write and edit his own copy, occasional subject-object errors go with the territory, but not checking sources and skipping the job of verifying the basics are simply derelictions of duty. (OWW sincerely hopes the nice newsman isn't taking actual financial advice from a guy who can't get the who, what, where, when and how-much parts of a 150-word story on his professional Website right).

Back in the mainsheet ...

Surely, It Wasn't All His Doing

"Polk County Tax Collector Joe Tedder deserves some thanks. After years of shifting more and more of the tax burden onto the shoulders of working families, he is leading a statewide fight to ensure everyone pays their fair share..."

We're sure he didn't do all that shifting by himself.

Feeling Fit: Your Weekly Dose of Plagiarism

It's "Feeling Fit" Sunday and the Charlotte Sun newspaper's reputation for plagiarism is upheld, once again, on page 11. Barbara Pierce kicks off her feature "Should Mom go to an assisted living facility?" this way: "When seniors begin to see a decline in their personal or mental health, assisted living becomes a good option."

That's also the way that the Internet site AssistedLivingFacilities.org opens its blog, Who Lives in Assisted Living: "When aging senior citizens begin to see a decline in their personal or mental health, assisted living care becomes a real benefit."

That same blog continues with, "Assisted living offers ... the comforts of home, as well as a social community in which to stay active."

Pierce's second paragraph changes the order a bit, but retains the blog's key words and distinctive phrasing: "Assisted living offers a community in which to stay active, with the comforts of home."

Pierce's third paragraph claims assisted living facilities provide a "desirable, cost-effective and dignified living environment," wording identical to the "Unlimited Care" website for a Spring, Texas, facility whose cottages provide a "... desirable, cost-effective and dignified living environment." The Texas site mentions "phenomenal growth" and Pierce does likewise.*

Although Pierce can read Internet websites well enough to plagiarize, she apparently can't read the part where Helpguide.org says she can't use its material if she plans to "sell or otherwise charge" for the material, placed posted at the bottom of every Helpguide.org page under "Reprints and Permissions." That's noteworthy because Pierce uses that website's content to fill out a dozen or so inches of a feature that she, we assume, sold to one of the profitable publications of Sun Coast Media Group, which in turn charges subscribers $1.75 to read the writing she was paid to produce

*Neither the Texas writer nor the plagiarist explains what phenomenal growth is. In the newspaper's Charlotte County home, that would be 14 new beds last year.

Headline Writer Misses the Joke; Column Writer Amazed by Discovery of "Secret" Product

Brett Slattery puts his tongue firmly in cheek and launches his advertisement for "Goof Off-Rust Stain Remover" (thinly disguised as column) by telling readers to paint their "home driveways and sidewalks rust-colored" to hide hard-water stains.

The kids on the copy desk decided that would make a dandy headline, entirely missing the part where the Goof Off promoter says, "On second thought, forget about painting your home driveway and sidewalks rust-colored," and gets on with urging readers to buy a "secret" product that he found "amazing" for keeping his house-for-sale signs tidy.

Sun Coast Media Group readers are accustomed to strange headlines emanating from the copy desk because the kids are yet not fully comfortable with the concept of reading. What subscribers are less accustomed to is a "columnist" who hasn't read the product label of an "amazing secret" that he's promoting.

The label Slattery isn't reading says his "amazing" and "secret" product is a 10-percent concentration of oxalic acid laced with a touch of hydrofluoric acid. Of course this reactive compound removes iron stains, as any high school chemistry student knows. It's a process called chelation, a multiple-ion bonding (chelate is Greek for "claw") that takes place at room temperature. It's simple: an oxalic acid molecule grabs on to several Fe2O3 (rust) electrons and forms a complex molecule that's highly water soluable. The new compound is ferric oxalate, and it rinses away with water.

It's neither "secret" nor "amazing;" it's 11th grade chemistry.

And by the way, do what Slattery forgot to tell you: Buy oxalic acid crystals for less than a buck a pound at the hardware store and dilute it yourself -- but be sure to read the label. It can be nasty stuff.

No Apologies

"That divorce is a prominent source of emotional anguish and suffering for children is obvious..." That's the opening of Rowland W. Folensbee Jr. and Florence F. Eddins-Folensbee's book review written six years ago for and published in The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

It's also a sentence published in the July 10 Charlotte Sun tab, "Feeling Fit." The news feature writer, Barbara Pierce, did not credit or acknowledge the Folensbees or their academic journal.

What the writer did was enclose that sentence in quotation marks and stuff it into the mouth of divorce researcher Judith S. Wallerstein. (Scroll down to see July 10 post.) The Charlotte Sun's feature writer also attributed another quote to Wallerstein, but that one hasn't yet been located in any of Wallerstein's works.

Pierce's motive may have been to give the story a dose of credibility that she, as a reporter, may have felt unable to deliver -- a local feature that would stand on its own merit. Let's use the Socratic method to see how well that worked.

Three questions are on the board for SCMG's ethics refresher workshop: (1) Should readers be told they've been handed a newspaper story which includes both stolen and apparently fabricated quotes that the writer inserted into the mouth of a person who wasn't interviewed? (2) Should the record be corrected to say one of the quotes comes from a publication that wasn't credited as the source? (3) Should the famous person who was not interviewed receive an apology for being made to appear to be in places where she wasn't, speaking to people she didn't speak to and saying things that she did not say?

Until "Feeling Fit" came along, Old Word Wolf would have considered these to be purely rhetorical questions -- ones in which the answer is universally understood.

Neither tab editor Karin Lillis, tab publisher David Powell, SCMG president David Dunn-Rankin nor writer Barbara Pierce has taken out space to set the record straight so the questions remain open for discussion. Do I see a hand in the back of the room?

Shabbat Plagiarism

It's Saturday morning. The Charlotte Sun has hit the driveway. We slip it from its sleeve and carry it to the breakfast table where the coffee is strong and the danish is sweet. Deep inside the newspaper's local section, Rabbi Solomon Agin tackles a current moral problem.

The teacher examines public intrusion via newspapers and such into private lives (of indiscreet politicians, for example) using the Scales of Justice where wisdom's fulcrum balances Torah on one side, and on the other -- another rabbi's blog.

Yes, Rabbi Agin has turned to Rabbi Mitchell Wohlberg's Blog and copied his June 11 sermon, representing it to Charlotte Sun editors as his own words of wisdom.

A couple of red flags would alert any reasonably awake newspaper editor. The first unfurls during the exercise of actually reading the copy: The sermon ends in mid-exposition. A genre that promises a lesson ends with the puzzling and arcane: "And Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because he married a Cushite woman."

Is this all there is? Yes and no. Yes; this is all the space the Charlotte Sun has for a Shabbat sermon. Cut it from the bottom. But why would a writer submit an article that requires four times the space allotted to discuss?

So, no, this is not all. The remaining 1,600 words are available on the Internet from the man who actually did the theology and exegesis, not to mention the blogging.

The second red flag is the desk itself, the desk of the newpaper's "religion editor" (or whoever pretends to this noble task).

The item comes from the word processor of a moral leader in the community. However, Charlotte Sun's religion editor should know by now that a man of god cannot be expected to translate the seventh commandment, "Thou shall not steal," to real-life journalism. And why should the local editor be expected to know this? Because Sun Coast Media Group's religion desk has a nationally recognized track record -- see left rail -- for hosting holy plagiarists.

Fun with Numbers: Informing the Citizenry

Editor Mat Delaney reports Lake Placid's town fathers have set next year's property tax rate at 3.81 mills. He says the millage rate represents $1 in taxes for every $1,000 in assessed value.

No, it doesn't. That millage rate represents $3.81 for every $1,000 assessed.

Delaney goes on to compound the error. He says a home "valued" at $50,000 would see a tax bill of $500. If this is supposed to be an example of a one-mill levy, he misses by a factor of ten (50,000 x 0.001 = 50). But, based on the news out of city hall, that tax bill would actually be $190.50 (50,000 x 0.00381).

As for that "tax bill" that he glibly predicts will be seen: Delaney forgets to mention that the city's levy is only part of the local property tax package that will include millages earmarked for schools, county government and services, state water management and any local taxing districts the citizenry voted to fund for fire, ambulance, mosquito control, etc., etc., etc.

If you write about numbers, you have to be numerate. If you cover city hall, it's not your job to paint a rosy picture by reporting only half the story.

Questionable Quotes Mar Local Feature

Barbara Pierce, Sun-Herald "correspondent," interviews a local practitioner about divorce's effect on children, and her reporting is a major feature in this morning's "fitness" tab.

Pierce quotes a local source and follows up with a second expert:

"Divorce is a prominent source of emotional anguish and suffering for children," said Judith Wallerstein, PhD, University of Berkeley, who did a 25-year study of children and divorce. "Divorce will involve sorrow and loss for your child."

"There are some legitimate reasons to get divorced," Taylor added.

The quote sandwich and attribution "Taylor added" strongly suggest both the local expert and the out-of-town expert are in the room with correspondent Pierce also present, reporting what the experts say to each other and helpfully explaining that Taylor "added" to Wallerstein's remark.

But why, a reader or editor might reasonably wonder: With such a well-known and high-powered expert in the room as Wallerstein, one who has oodles of primary data at her fingertips, why would the reporter use Wallerstein's expertise just once in 25 inches, opting instead to feature the observations of the less-expert local counselor, who -- oddly -- is given the role of adding to the national expert's observations?

If the story's bizarre imbalance isn't enough to give pause, surely an editor would detect one or two of at least four additional red flags signaling a reporter run amok:

Red Run-Amok Flag No. 1: Correspondent Pierce omits any identification of the context in which she heard the out-of-town expert, Wallerstein, tell the reporter her thoughts ("... said in an e-mail," " ... said in a telephone interview from her New York offices," "... said during her keynote address to the National Social Worker's convention held last December in Las Vegas ... "). The omission is dishonest. The reporter doesn't truthfully explain how or when she came to know that Wallerstein said what her story claims she said.

Red Run-Amok Flag No. 2: With Correspondent Pierce making it appear as if she had interviewed Wallerstein when it seems likely that she may not have, a reasonably alert editor would make a move to query the reporter for the quote's actual source. If it had turned out that the reporter lifted the words from Wallerstein's numerous entries at Huffington Post or from another newspaper article or from a professional journal, then that source must be named -- at least according to the ethical standards at most modern newspapers. If the real source of the quote is not named, then the reporter is plagiarizing from a publication she has not credited.

Red Run-Amok Flag No. 3: Maybe the quote does not come from a particular source. Maybe Correspondent Pierce (herself a social worker, according to her article's footnote) is paraphrasing the gist of what she thinks Wallerstein has said in a book or article. If this is the case, then the reporter has fabricated the quotation -- actually, fabricated two quotations.

Red Run-Amok Flag No. 4: There's no such institution as "University of Berkeley." Wallerstein is famously a Senior Lecturer Emerita at the University of California's Berkeley School of Social Welfare.

The editor and reporter can probably reach her through UC Berkeley to confirm facts, correct errors, and apologize for putting words in her mouth.

In other news from the fitness desk ...

Story: Avoid "wacky ingredients" and make "favorite snacks from scratch."

Editor's file art choice: A jar of red licorice twists. What's in a licorice twist? Let's read a Twizzlers' label: Corn syrup, wheat flour, sugar, cornstarch, licorice extract, palm oil, natural and artificial flavors, glycerin potassium sorbate, artificial color (Blue 1 and Red 40), caramel color, soy lecithin.

How might readers make a healthy Twizzler from scratch? That's not in the story.

The unintentional irony of a headline elsewhere in the same edition pretty much sums it up.