On 28 February 2000, the ABC's Media Watch caught me out on a comprehensive screw-up. I had published an article in The Age on 22 November 1999 which contained serious factual errors. When the errors were brought to my notice by an e-mail from an Age reader, I issued an unsolicited retraction article, which The Age printed on 24 November 1999.
Unfortunately, I had not merely failed to check my facts properly -- though that is bad and embarrassing enough. The article, which was a comment piece, used as the basis for comment an extended factual description previously published by Jon Dougherty on WorldNetDaily, and I neglected to cite that as my source or to rewrite it in my own words. Media Watch caught me in an act of plagiarism of factual material. (All writers for newspapers use unacknowledged facts and borrow phrases: it is the scale in this case which makes it a different matter. That it was my only such offence does not make it less of a wrong).
Indignation over the content of the tale overrode my judgement. The text came to me embedded in an e-mail from a reputable source clearly intended for dissemination. I did not register the fact that it was from a publication, although I should have and, in any case, other people's words should be acknowledged. Ironically, if I had taken the information directly from, and been aware of, the WorldNetDaily Website, I would probably have been aware of the retraction that Dougherty had already published and my first article would have been pulled prior to publication.
The Age subsequently informed me that because I had committed the "unforgivable journalistic sin, that of plagiarism" it would no longer consider publishing me. The Editor, Michael Gawenda, has now raised the bar very high for The Age journalists and commentators. All someone has to do is find a case of plagiarism and Gawenda will be obliged to sack them.
A freelance writer friend, who has never been accused of sins of omission or commission, commented to me that he would love to have The Age publicly announce he was banned, rather than the surreptitious blackballing he now suffers.
Meanwhile, the ABC continues to invite me on air to discuss public policy issues.
Alas, other elements of the ABC ran true to form. The story posted on the ABC Website also managed to imply that more than one incident was involved, which was false.
Also running true to form was Media Watch. The thesis I have been advancing in print for some time about the ABC is that it is a staff-captured organisation with inadequate accountability, whose staff use their position to engage in ostentatious display of the current collection of morally fashionable opinions, and so reflect a narrow range of views. Media Watch provides an ideal tool with which to punish those who get in the way of such moral vanity by doing such things as raising inconvenient facts. Chris Kenny can attest to as much from the hatchet job done on him by Media Watch on 7 August 1995 over his coverage of the Hindmarsh Island concoction. The subsequent Royal Commission specifically vindicated Chris Kenny, and also showed up how much the ABC coverage had been distorted by ABC staff engaging in conspicuous "correctness" on the issue. This persecution of dissent by Media Watch protected the ABC staff's own self-indulgent posturing: the ABC in its manifestation as the Ministry of Truth. Needless to say, Kenny has never received any apology from the ABC.
Another incident occurred on 28 September 1998. The 1998 Federal Election campaign was underway, the ABC had become the subject of controversy and I had begun releasing the results of the monitoring of the prime-time News coverage by the ABC and the commercial TV stations. Media Watch also suggested that I had failed to highlight the performance of commercial media. Yet, in its second report -- covering week three of the campaign -- I, far from obscuring the unfavourable coverage of Coalition policies on commercial TV News, drew explicit attention to it. Media Watch resorted to the peculiar concept of a comment being "buried" in a one-page press release and failed to inform ABC viewers that the fact sheet attached to the same press release had data headings explicitly focusing on commercial TV News coverage.
Meanwhile, ABC staff rang commercial journalists casting doubts on the methodology of my media monitoring. By contrast, the Nine Network -- whose coverage in weeks two and three of the campaign were found by my media monitoring to be more unfavourable to the Coalition than that of the ABC's over the same period -- made no attempt to "heavy" me or close down debate on this issue. Nor did any other commercial TV station.
On 30 September 1999, in articles published in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on bias in the ABC, I wrote
I have no problem with same-sex marriage or adoption, and believe that narcotics should be legalised because adults own their own bodies. This should clearly class me as a standard-bearer for the counter-culture.
But the ABC is cleverer than that: they can see right through me. I am, in fact, an ultra-conservative. Or at least, that is what they told Australia.
Move on to 28 February 2000 and the Media Watch piece which dealt with my sins. Paul Barry:
Wood hates welfare, whiners, and what he calls progressive views, but most of all he hates the ABC.
This is sneering misrepresentation of a type that Media Watch would be the first to leap on if done by a conservative columnist. I hate none of these things and can't recall condemning complainers or using the term "whiners". It takes remarkable moral blindness or arrogance, and lack of accountability, in the process of catching a major critic of the ABC in a significant error, also to provide further evidence for his principal thesis.
As for the charge of plagiarism, what is the problem with plagiarism? After all, there is the "if it is good enough for Shakespeare, it is good enough for you" defence. The wrong in plagiarism is a mixture of theft and dishonesty. Where people are making a living from charging for access to material, to reproduce it may deprive them of income. Where they are making a living from the reputation of their creation, there is also a potential loss of income from reproduction. On the other hand, citing them as a source furthers the reputation effect (which is why academia has such strong taboos against plagiarism). Moreover, if you are putting your name to words, readers are entitled to think that they are your words.
What constitutes plagiarism in public debate can get very unclear. Writers of media releases hope to be plagiarised: at least one major public relations firm has a noticeboard on which it displays press releases which have been reproduced verbatim in the press (take note Messers Gawenda and Barry). Writers for think-tanks also write in the hope that they will be plagiarised. Although being cited is pleasant, having one's arguments and ideas turn up elsewhere is a very acceptable second-best outcome. One of the jobs of an opinion writer is to let readers know what is being said in particular circles, which, given word-constraints in articles, can lead to a lot of borrowing. And politicians and other public figures are forever putting their name to words written by others.
As one experienced journalist has pointed out to me, the most insidious form of plagiarism in Australian public debate is that, in his words, "so many journalists hold fashionable opinions they could not possibly rationalise". Opinions derived from claims typically circulated by advocacy groups, which are unsourced, endlessly repeated and often quite false: ludicrous overstatements of the rate of species extinction, the death toll from Chernobyl, the extent of the "stolen generation" and so forth. Claims which demonstrate the power of Goebbels' maxim that a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth. What such opinions typically have in common is they flatter the moral pretensions of the utterer.
When the experienced US columnist William F. Buckley Jnr published an article on 6 November 1999 on the same issue as my original article, he did the right thing and cited his source. Yet his source was not Jon Dougherty, but a Mr Mike Nye, who was circulating the information via e-mail. Nevertheless, the wording of the extract which Buckley also published is very similar to that in Dougherty's article: so either Dougherty was Nye's source, or Nye was Dougherty's source or both were using someone else. What really was the original source? It can get murky on the Internet.
The Internet is changing the world in many ways. It is also modifying conventions about use and ownership, although this is not offered as a defence in my case. Along with new opportunities, it brings new traps. I hope my errors and negligence in this matter will be a clear warning to others.
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