Dodgy, Dodgy, Dodgy

PhotoShopping a huge blot of empty white space around the figures -- to the point of erasing an otherwise well-defined horizon and washing away the Gulf's golden reflections --  makes Charlotte Sun's Feb. 14 front page photo look more like a Viagra ad than journalism. Dodgy, dodgy, dodgy.

Plagiarism in the News

"Live from Venice" blogger Mary Kay Ruppel recently posted a comment to this blog that, in between calling Old Word Wolf nasty names, picks a quarrel with our use of the term "plagiarism." She calls it "very broad and incorrect."  We are sorry to say Ruppel is not only wrong about this, but also sorry to see that she continues to demonstrate in her own blog that she does not know when she plagiarizes.  As it turned out, her nasty-gram and her partially plagiarized Feb. 10 blog post foreshadowed this morning mail's notice of a relevant article posted at The Poynter Institute's website by Craig Silverman (founder of "Regret the Error").  Silverman comments on the news  that a Connecticut newspaper group, The Journal Register Company, now requires reporters to take a plagiarism knowledge test.  The relevance is that Ruppel's post demonstrates most of the errors that the test focuses on.

Here's the evidence. Ruppel's Feb. 10 post, headlined  “The Degredation [sic] of the Election Process," contains some distinctive phrasing:  a super PAC operator is a wealthy donor to conservative causes.  That’s followed by a quote attributed to a man Ruppel did not interview.  Ruppel says the donor’s strategy is a plan to play in the contests ahead in order to escalate the battle among a few dozen wealthy Republicans to influence their party’s choice of a presidential nominee. Near the bottom of her post, she says his “money played a pivotal part in Santorum’s unexpected wins in three states last week.”

Two days before Ruppel’s post, New York Times writers Jim Rutenberg and Nicholas Confessore published a story under the headline “A Wealthy Backer Likes the Odds on Santorum.”

Here’s how the professionals describe the super-PAC man:  “Foster Friess, a wealthy donor to conservative causes...” In the same story, they identify an interview that yielded a quote from Friess that Ruppel copies without acknowledging who held the interview, when it was conducted, or – particularly relevant to this plagiarism discussion -- how she comes to know that Friess claims he "couldn't figure out why Santorum was even bothering to go through the effort."  We're pretty sure Ruppel knows what he says because Rutenberg and Confessore published their hard work in the New York Times. Plagiarism happens whenever a writer reports a source's quote as if she has has first-hand access when she hasn't, and then fails to include the honest acknowledgment that she's lifted the quotate from a newspaper article that someone else reported.

By this point, it appears that Ruppel has failed the Journal Register's plagiarism quiz questions 1 and 2.

She plagiarizes again when she copies, and does not say from where, the conclusion that the millionaire intends to ‘play’ the contests ahead in order to escalate the battle among a few dozen wealthy Republicans to influence their part’s choice of a presidential nominee.

Ruppel's blog post provides two additional examples relevant to this explication -- on "the other side" of the ledger.

When Ruppel writes that the super-PAC operator played a “pivotal part” in Santorum’s “unexpected wins,” she synonym swaps (the NYT guys wrote “pivotal role”), suggesting that she's trying to avoid a charge of copying word for word. Ironically, she really didn’t have to worry about that because a phrase such as “pivotal role” is a cliché that appears thousands of times a day in printed matter across the land – it’s nearly an idiomatic expression in the language.  On the other hand, her studied process of changing out a word or two here and in other places in the blog post might suggest the covering of tracks -- which the honest attributor doesn’t have to do.

And finally, in all fairness, we are happy to point out that deep in the heart of Ruppel’s post, she nearly gets it right and should get an E for effort if not actual achievement.  Ruppel writes: "Yesterday I read a column in our liberal newspaper about the poor job Romney had done as Governor of Massachusetts. A year into Romney's term, Massachusetts began to stop losing jobs.  The state added jobs every year until Romney stepped down in 2007. Even so,according to Jia Lynn Yang, The Washington Post, he did a poor job."

We added the italics to highlight Yang's sentences -- complete and word for word. The rules of avoiding plagiarism require that any exact wording requires the display of quotation marks.  A reference in the next sentence, which takes up a different part of the discussion, is inadequate to honestly point Ruppel's readers to the sentences she copied.

So, what's Ruppel's quiz grade?  We calculate 2 out of 5 plagiarism standards were not violated in the writing of Ruppel's Feb. 10 column, making her score a dismal 40 percent by default (no press releases or blogs, the topics of questions 3 and 4, were involved).

As for Ruppel's charge that we don't know the definition of plagiarism, here's a close paraphrase of one that's widely circulated and which I use as the guideline for all the college-level writing classes that I teach: Plagiarism means: using another writer's words or ideas without honest attribution.

Do I have to cite my source for this definition? No, not really.  It's common knowledge -- which means that everyone knows this. Everyone except ....

Hospital Getting Diverted into Gulf of Mexico

There's no journalistic reason to run a photograph 40 degrees off its normal orientation, except maybe to make an uninformative, boring, or poorly composed picture more ...  tilted?

" ... in Miami on Tuesday."

"Hey! The story has art!" 

"And the art has a cutline!"

"Breaking news!"

Letter Writer Agnes Howard Plagiarizes Her Obama Libel

Agnes Howard of Port Charlotte, Fla., wrote a recent letter to the Charlotte Sun in which she seemed more unoriginal* and irrational than most, even considering the local  "tea party" blow-hards that the editors like to encourage (by publishing).  And she was.  

Agnes Howard is not just nasty with her words and wrong in her out-of-context "facts," but it looks like she might be a plagiarist as well. The letter that Port Charlotte's own Agnes Howard signed and sent to the editors as her composition has appeared in half a dozen other newspapers across the land since last December, has been reprinted under another name at an AOL news digest and other sites, as well.  It's impossible to tell, at this point, who the originator might be, but it's obvious who at least one of the plagiarists is.

Isn't the Web wonderful?  It's not necessary to work at being ignorant any more; the Internet can do it for you. Just sign here.

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*Nikita Khrushchev of Russia ....? Yes, Agnes not only says this, she leads with it.

Plagiarism Infects Medical Tab's Web Edition

Sun Coast Media Group plagiarism has migrated from its print edition to contaminate its Web spawn. Feeling Fit, the Charlotte Sun’s weekly tab conceived to attract pricey ads from doctors and hospitals, was once confined to print. Now, anyone can see it at Feelingfit.net (no www).

Filling whatever space the ad people didn’t sell, both web and print editions feature local copy. Unfortunately, local copy is frequently plagiarized, and often in some pretty sneaky ways. But that’s not today.

Today’s Sun Coast Media Group plagiarism – Web style – starts with old fashioned cut-and-paste and finishes with a couple of “edits,” which turn out to be about as effective at covering the writer’s plagiarism as shuffling in the sand is at covering a beachcomber’s tracks.

Carren Bersch, “Feeling Fit Correspondent,” is the by-line at the top of the Website article, “Early Detection Key to Treating Peripheral Artery Disease.” For Bersch's benefit, we’ll review two basic concepts.

First, a by-line means the named writer actually wrote everything that doesn’t appear between quotation marks. And, at real newspapers, reporters (or “correspondents”) are obligated (except in extraordinary circumstances) to tell readers exactly where the information comes from, whether it’s a direct quote or a paraphrased summary.(Unless, of course, Bersch is a qualified authority whose training, background and experience people can count on when she claims that peripheral artery disease “can lead to strokes and transient ischemic attacks.” However, absent the letters M.D. after her name, I think we can rule out her actual qualifications to make medical pronouncements.)*

And finally, let’s review the definition of plagiarism. Plagiarism, in fact, does not always have to be the slavish, word-for-word theft of another writer’s copy in order to present it as one’s own, which is the plagiarism method that Carren Bersch uses in the first two paragraphs of the story that she claims to have written. Plagiarism also happens when someone like Bersch copies the order of ideas that another writer uses to organize the original copy. Bersch does this as well. And, finally, plagiarism happens even when the word-idea-and-outline-thief changes a couple of words, creates some elisions, or flips a few expressions. In fact, this latter step is pretty much de facto evidence that the plagiarist was engaged in a willful cover-up of her nasty habit.
__________________
*Based on Carren Bersch's performance as a “correspondent,” readers can also rule out her qualification as an honest writer with ethical standards that preclude stealing the work of others and presenting it as her own (and the moxy to take a paycheck for it?)

Cute Goes Creepy

"There are those in our community who exemplify the true mean of the season."

"questionable..." "... creeping..," "invading..,"  "... living among us."

The Arcadian's effort at wit this morning comes off as a somewhat creepy, 50-word lead with no news in sight, proving the value of the J-school lesson:  Tell it straight. Don't go for cute, coy, funny, ironic, subtle. You probably won't pull it off. You're a journalist, not O. Henry. And the typo didn't help.

Raw Bits

Bit Nos. 1 and 2: The Missing Copy Editor. A small regional airline "plans to add 737 planes to its arsenal." The writer thinks the word for a building that houses explosives is a synonym for "fleet."

Bit No. 3: Wrong Picture. "...chatting it up" is British for "staring at the camera."







Bit No. 4:  Percent vs. Percentage Point. The Journal over in Lake Placid continues Sun Coast Media Group's willful disregard for numeracy.  Editors wrongly inform readers that the state graduation rate has increased 10 percent since 2006, when in fact it has increased 10 percentage points since that time. We'll explain (again).

In 2006, Florida's graduation rate (the state Department of Education says), was calculated as 70.3 percent of students counted.  This year it was calculated as 80.1 percent of students counted.  If the number had increased by 10 percent from a base of 70, the new figure would be about 77 (70 x 0.01 = 0.7). That's good news for high school students. For newspaper editors, not so much.

Bit No. 5: The lazy economic indicator. "... it is reported ..." Yes, it was reported. But the editorialist doesn't say it was reported three years ago in a study run by a civic group in Grand Rapids, Mich., based on its  2007 survey of 19 Grand Rapids businesses. And, there's that pesky percentage vs. percentage point error again. The study used its data to deduce that if $100 is spent at locally owned businesses, $64 hangs around town. That's not the same as 60 percent more than the paltry $43 that hangs around when $100 is spent with those evil out of towners.

Bit No. 6: Amateur Photoshopping: We intended  asking when "stately" became a synonym for "portly" but were distracted by Santa's helping hands: 

_________________________________________

Gravity Shift

Editorial's "American Century" Reference Misses the Point

Yesterday's Charlotte Sun-Herald editorial, "Day of Infamy Followed by Greatest Resolve," praises veterans who responded to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  About halfway into the editorial, the writer calls Dec. 7, 1941  the "trigger"  that began the era called "The American Century."

No it didn't. The allusion is to "The American Century," Henry R. Luce's five-page editorial in Life m magazine that ran Feb. 17, 1941 -- ten months before Pearl Harbor.

Furthermore, if the editor were to actually read the article from which he takes his praise, he might recognize its profound naivete and thinly veiled jingoism.  Under a subheading worthy of Genesis, Luce describes "America's Vision of Our World ... How it shall be created." He identifies American "prestige" as the light emanating from Hollywood, jazz, slang and "patented products."  American artifacts are "the only things that every community in the world ... recognizes in common," Luce claims as if this is a good thing.

Luce's shaping thesis is the United States had entered a war (on the European front -- Pearl Harbor had not happened yet) that has the potential of bringing into focus an era of achievement.  "The American Century" is not Luce's reference specifically to war, but to "four propositions."  Luce's propositions are that the world is indivisible; the war has the potential to destroy humankind; the world can now produce "all the material needs of the entire human family;" and "the world of the 20th Century, if it is to come to life with any nobility of health and vigor, must be to a significant degree an American Century."

From that point, Luce goes on to lay out an American-centric view of the near future: America will deploy "engineers, scientists, doctors," as well as people he calls "movie men, makers of entertainment, developers of airlines."  He rounds out the list with teachers and educators.  His vision is that this American horde will be "eagerly welcomed" because they have "underake[n] to be the Good Samaritan of the entire world."  Luce proclaims "the manifest duty of this country to undertake to feed all the people of the world... a humanitarian army of Americans..."

The tenor and content of Luce's "The American Century" ring hollow. Sun editors have the benefit of having studied half century of history since. Surely they see the havoc we wreak every time we try to remake one part of the globe or another in our own image. Too bad no one at the Charlotte Sun took the time to check out the history and context of the infamous phrase.

Rip Van Winkle Named Charlotte-Sun Political Cartoon Editor

The Charlotte Sun editorial page cartoon this morning shows Herman Cain thinking "It ain't over till it's over," as he keeps his campaign afloat.  Problem is, Cain announced four days ago that he had suspended his campaign -- and the Charlotte Sun ran that story three days ago, on Sunday.

Speaking of Sunday, that was the day the same page editor ran a cartoon of a man on a bicycle, delivering an Omaha, Neb., newspaper with the headline  "Local Boy Keeps Newspaper Local."  If the only newspaper readers here in  southwest Florida see is the Charlotte Sun-Herald, then there is no way they could know that Warren Buffett announced plans on Nov. 30 to buy his hometown newspaper. The Sun-Herald didn't carry that story.

And, according to Sun editorial page editors, columnist Kathleen Parker seems to have found a new home in central Florida at a newspaper owned by the Chicago-based Tribune Cos., but likes to get her e-mail at the Washington Post.

Would someone please wake up Rip?

Stoopid News

Tom Cappiello: "Pizza now satisfies the vegetable requirement for school lunches."

No, it doesn't.  Just because Fox News says it, doesn't make it so.

Cappiello's unattributed, unsourced declaration in one of the best-read, locally produced columns in Sun Coast Media Group's health-topics tab is a major disservice -- and embarrassingly  incorrect in every possible way.

The recently passed spending bill (H.R. 2112, mainly agricultural appropriations) which Cappiello does not identify, forbids the use of its funding to implement any revisions to the nation's two operative school-nutrition acts.

Specifically, the Childhood Nutrition Act of 1966 as amended (most recently in 2010), permits two tablespoons or more of tomato paste to "count toward" a vegetable serving.  The tomato paste lobby succeeded in getting H.R. 2112's "forbids" language inserted because there had been a move afoot to increase that requirement to a quarter-cup of tomato paste (about twice two tablespoons).

Any columnist worth the ink owes it to readers to verify his pronouncements and claims regarding legislation at www.Thomas.gov.

In fact, there is nothing "now" about the tomato-paste allowance; there is nothing about "pizza" in the legislation, and there is nothing in this news that had not already been launched and endorsed during Reagan's administration.

Cappiello owes his readers a correction.

Copy Desk Kidz Predict Future

"Jackson doctor gets two years."
No, he didn't.  Last time we checked, Charlotte Sun-Herald page designers had not been issued crystal balls. The judge presiding over Michael Jackson's manslaughter case gave the doctor four years in the clink.  So why would the desk kids send out a headline saying the doctor got "two years?"

Well, against all odds, the headline writer read the story.  Far down in the copy, the AP writer says -- without providing a source for the wisdom -- that prison crowding makes it "likely" the doctor will serve "less than two years."  Yes, the copy desk kidz actually read a story before writing the headline.  Unfortunately, they didn't read it accurately, carefully, critically or intelligently.

Alone for the Holidays? Paint the Bathroom -- or Plagiarize.

This morning's "Feeling Fit" tab in the Charlotte Sun-Herald features Barbara Pierce tucking bits and pieces of an Internet site, eHow.com,  into a seasonal feature: "Alone for the holidays?  Meet the challenge."  If Pierce is on someone's gift-giving list, she needs a good book on ethics, attribution, and the fundamentals of research.

In a perverse way, however, Pierce's plagiarism is less terrifying than the advice she makes up.  The retired social worker advises lonely readers to  “think about the reasons you are alone.”

And, if contemplating the reasons one is alone on a major family holiday isn’t cheering, Pierce asks readers to answer the question, “if you are alone because you don’t have a partner, why don’t you have one?”

But to really feel good about being alone, Pierce advises cleaning out a closet and painting the bathroom.  And if that is still not cheerful enough, “cry,”  perform a “ritual of remembrance,” spend the day at a nursing home or animal shelter, and finish some old needlework. Oh, joy!

Plagiarism by Pierce isn't the only "Feeling Fit" item this week that has its roots in the Internet.

Too Much

The Journal of Lake Placid, best known for its in-depth coverage of holiday parades and middle-school sports, carries an unusual police-blotter story on the front page today. Three weeks ago, an 87-year-old woman apparently confessed to killing her 93-year old deaf and blind husband because she said she was tired of caring for him, the sheriff’s office reported.

            The sad story – one that clearly has a lot of local interest – told the basics two weeks ago.  The Nov. 2 story reported names, addresses, times and the fact that the wife was charged with murder.  The follow-up story that appears today rightly includes what officials say appears to have happened and why they think so.  But today’s news rides on the coattails of an autopsy report, prompting Journal reporter/editor Mat Delaney into share::

            Three knives were protruding from the man when first responders arrived. [... The victim was found]  in bed with three kitchen knives still sticking from his nude body.  [... The victim]  was found lying on his left side in the couple’s bed in the master bedroom with three large kitchen knives embedded past the hilt and protruding from his exposed right side. Secondary stab wounds were observed ... [in the victim’s ] neck as well as the right portion of his abdomen.  [The victim] suffered eight stab wounds, including three shallow wounds to his back. Five wounds were deep penetrating stabbing injuries that pierced organs and major arteries with a blade longer than nine inches. The report said a total of four knives were used in the killing. 

 This level of detail serves no purpose other than to horrify. It certainly derails the urgency to report that a story on the same front page ("Vercipia Biofuel Plant is Topic for Rotarians") is plagiarized from a company news release.

Hole In Space

1. Retouching photographs is sinning in the temple of journalism. 

2. Submitting a retouched photograph tells the congregation you use your camera and Photoshop to lie.

3. Besides, Frank Kananaugh, you aren't even good at it. 

4. Which  Charlotte Sun editor was at lunch when this hole in space came up for review?

Every Editor's Nightmare Typo

The promo drops the "l" from "public," and the day's top headline fails to detect subject and verb disagreement -- all on page one of yesterday's Arcadian.

Copy editors are a newspaper's best friend. Copy editors know the difference between "then" and "than. " They know the difference between "on" and "about."  They know the difference between "request" and "require."


And then, there's the kids' crash blossom on the heels of a genuine post hoc propeter hoc fallacy in the main sheet:

Significant Omissions

"State adds 23,300 jobs."

No, it doesn't. 

But not one single editor at the Charlotte Sun thought that plump, round number looked a bit fishy.

In fact, the U.S. Department of Labor estimates that Florida probably added about 23,300 non-agricultural jobs in September. But readers are unlikely to know these points of accuracy unless a reporter actually does his job.  

Here’s how the reporter doesn't do his job: 

• Doesn't say the report is passing along an estimate.
• Doesn't say the estimate comes from sampling  surveys – not from tax receipts, not from counts of vacancies filled, not from tallies of names added to payrolls. 

Here’s what the reporter does do:

• Omits the fact that the federal labor department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics altered its sampling sizes between two of the periods compared.
• Omits the fact that the feds have been sending the states the estimates since March with a specific caveat:   “New estimation procedures may result in more month-to-month variability in the estimates, particularly in smaller SMAs.”

Sure, we’re all hungry for good news, particularly in the jobs arena.

But in real journalism, fantasy, spin and lies by omission are never good news.

Who the Heck is Chris Adams?

The new bylines at Feeling Silly Fit have taken to launching stories with irrelevant quotes from "experts"  they didn’t interview. This week’s example of silly quoting is a weight-loss related snippet attributed to someone named Chris Adams.

“People say that losing weight is no walk in the park. When I hear that I think, yeah, that’s the problem.” -- Chris Adams.

The problem is New Byline fails to tell readers who the heck Chris Adams is or what his or her authority is for commenting on park walking as a weight-loss strategy. In an attempt to fill that editorial lacunae, Old Word Wolf located five very real possibilities from the Web and arranged a multiple choice test:

Chris Adams, Feeling Fit's “walk in the park” weight-loss expert, is:
(a) The “human factors engineer” who specializes in furniture design and writes for About.com.
(b) The dead British wrestler whose fitness program involved large doses of gin and human growth hormone.
(c) The Atlanta-based purchasing manager at “Thrive Weight Loss” who writes grammatically challenged news releases at U-Publish.com (“How Do You Lose Weight Easily” without the question mark) and sells stuff.
(d) The Boise, Idaho-based fitness guru who promises customers they will be “completely revitalized” by his “unique approach” to weight loss (“No Gym Fees!!”).
(e) Something that New Byline found at  www.quotegarden.com and believed that if he made it the lede, readers couldn't help but read the rest of the story.

Sun Coast Math: 1,597 = 1,588

That didn't last long: ...
Yesterday, Sun editors announced a new A Section -- all local news. Today, the Saudi assassination attempt leads the local front.