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.

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