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.

Monday Morning Makeup

No naked men were Tasered Saturday except in the imagination of the Charlotte Sun 's weekend make-up artists.

An intoxicated man stripped down to his boxers .... "... attempted to pull his underwear off but could not ... "

The kids who replaced the real copy editors still can't figure it out: "Page make-up" is not the same as "make things up."

Making (Racist) Stuff Up

George Duncan's editorial in the Lake Placid Journal this week leads with an unnamed source that slams Barack Obama's father's moral compass. Readers might reasonably expect an explanation to follow. Instead, Duncan's second paragraph wanders to a C.S. Lewis comment regarding the "self explanatory" nature of a "Christian hospital" (garbling the original). Now, readers might reasonably expect the discussion to turn to hospitals. That doesn't happen, either.

The substance of Duncan's column turns out to be a pat on the back for a fine organization serving migrant families, an organization that is neither a hospital nor related to Barack Obama's father.

Duncan's editorial segue adds up to xenophobic code for his anti-Muslim, anti-Obama message wrapped in a weird form of pious self-congratulation. Readers can see the clip below the fold.

But before clicking, a side note: Old Word Wolf telephoned Duncan yesterday afternoon to seek his help in tracking down his unnamed "British biographer." Duncan said he could not remember who the author is, did not have any notes , and did not know the name of the book. A little prodding from OWW elicited that Duncan had not actually read a book. He had heard an interview on cable television but couldn't remember when.

With that, OWW located March 20, 2011 BookTV clip in which historian Peter Firstbrook discusses "The Untold Story of an African Family" with interviewer Dinish D'Souza.

Listening to the interview, OWW finds Duncan's editorial does three things to the original. First, Duncan uses only half the biographer's quote, stripping it of context. Next, Duncan invents half the information -- Firstbrook never says anything about Christian altruism. And third, the discussion is about Obama's paternal grandfather. For whatever reason, Duncan chooses to attribute a lack of Christian sensibility to Obama's father.

We have a technical term for this: it's called "making stuff up." We also have a word to describe the editor's deliberate exploitation and mischaracterization of a 19th century Kenyan in order to deliver a covert political message: racist.





Transcript of the Firstbrook interview (approximately minutes 54.00- 58.00)

Interviewer: You explore in the book that while Obama's father --actually his grandfather -- converted to Islam and took the name Hussein , that in fact Obama senior, the president's father .. and this is also true of his stepfather later in Indonesia: They were born Muslim but they were really atheists. Obama's mom herself, we know, was also an atheist. There is a lot of speculating that Obama is some kind of a Muslim ... say a word about that. Is Obama a Muslim, is he a Christian?

Firstbrook: I can say that I find absolutely no evidence that he was a Muslim, but let me just explain how the Muslim faith got into the family. Onyango, the grandfather, born in 1895, was born into the traditional Luo religion. They worshiped a man named Niacia, and it was basically a traditional African animist religion. When the missionaries came, he did for a brief while convert to Christianity and took the name Johnson according to Sarah Obama. The first missionaries that came to that part of Kenya were actually Seventh Day Adventists. In fact most of the Obama family out in Kenya are still SDA. Then in 1914, when Onyango was drafted into the British army into the King's African Rifles, he served with the British in their portage call.

After the first World War, he moved onto Zanzibar, where for the first time he was exposed to Islam, and he came back in about 1920 to his village a Muslim. I said to a lot of them, "What was it about Islam that appealed to Onyango?" There were two explanations. One was that Onyango could never understand the Christian sense of compassion. And, he saw the world in black and white and that the simplicity of Islam appealed to him. And the other thing that seemed to appeal to him was the fact that you could have five wives. And he liked the idea. He was very much a ladies' man, and people would joke and say he liked the idea of having five wives under Islam.

Interviewer: Doesn't Islam allow only four wives?
Firstbrook: I thought it was five. But actually in Kenya there are [garbled]... very liberally interpreted. But that's how Hussein -- he then took the name Hussein -- Onyango, when he converted to Islam. He ended up having five wives, and actually all the wives except the president's grandmother were Islam. Akumu, who was the president's paternal grandmother, was born a Christian but she had to convert when she married Onyango. So that's how Islam got into the family. Barack Obama senior, the father, was brought up a Muslim but he left home, as you say rightly, renounced any religion. And by the time he got to Hawaii, and as far as he was concerned Islam, all, was mumbo jumbo ... there wasn't any really significant religious influence in the president's life until he went to Chicago ... the churches were a political organization ...

New Staff Writer Republishes His Old Stuff

Josh Salman, writing for the Times-Union back in January, led a story he wrote about solar power this way:

The Sunshine State is beginning to live up to its name, with an explosion of residents using solar-powered energy for both environmental and financial reasons.

Now a Charlotte Sun staff writer, Salman kicks off his Sunday story this morning on solar power the same way -- even recycling the "explosion of residents," despite having had nine months to reconsider:

The Sunshine State is beginning to live up to its name, with an explosion of residents using solar-powered energy for both environmental and financial reasons.

As a Times-Union reporter, Salman quoted a solar consulting firm:

... the new incentives are also expected to create an additional 22,000 solar-related jobs in Florida within 8 years, according to a study by Navigant Consulting Inc., a consulting firm specializing in the energy industry.

Charlotte Sun readers got essentially same data this morning, changing only a time frame that prompts the question of when, exactly, did this prediction take place.

State rebates and federal tax credits are expected to create more than 22,000 jobs in Florida within six years, according to Navigant Consulting, a firm specializing in the energy industry.

Salman’s newer solar energy story takes a breezy survey of officials, residents, and a saleswoman, culminating in these factoids:

The advantages of solar stretch beyond the wallet. Over its projected lifespan, a 5-kilowatt solar system will offset 298,106 pounds of carbon dioxide, 928 pounds of nitrogen oxide, 840 pounds of sulfur dioxide, and 57 pounds of particles that cause asthma. The savings are equivalent to taking one car off the road for 40 years, or planting nearly 3 acres of trees.

Readers, however, are left wondering: who said this? How was this equivalency calculated? These are extremely specific numbers. A fairly extensive Web search fails to locate a single one of them.

So: Welcome, Josh Salman. But stop recycling your old stuff. And start telling us where you get your data. If you are going to report something that’s not general knowledge, or numbers that require conversion, manipulation or interpretation, you are obligated to tell us who is giving you those numbers. It makes a difference if they come from a university laboratory or from a solar-panel salesman (or saleswoman). Just to show how obvious this problem is, the unsubstantiated/unattributed factoid that using a 5-kilowatt solar system over its lifetime is “equivalent of taking one car from the road for 40 years,” is meaningless unless we know whether the car is a 1969 Chevy Corvette or a 2009 Prius.

Actually, it's meaningless no matter what kind of car it is. All the more reason to know who is making this stuff up.