Wente and Dowd cell phone columns: Too close to call?
A column by The Globe and Mail‘s Margaret Wente so closely resembles one written by The New York Times‘s Maureen Dowd that at least one blog is suggesting she stole it. Anne McNeilly asks whether it was just a bizarre coincidence.
A column by The Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente so closely resembles one written by The New York Times‘s Maureen Dowd that at least one blog is suggesting she stole it. Anne McNeilly asks whether it was just a bizarre coincidence.
Was it plagiarism or poetic licence when Globe
and Mail columnist Margaret Wente recently wrote a column about cell phones that
closely resembled one written two days earlier by New York Times columnist
Maureen Dowd?
Wente has been writing a provocative and
interesting column since its inception in the Globe 10 years ago and she’s
picked up a couple of National Newspaper Awards along the way. She is arguably
one of the country’s best known columnists and she has a legion of fans – and
critics. Whether you agree or disagree
with her point of view, she always has one and she delivers it with style –
unlike the increasing number of often undisciplined and narcissistic bloggers
who bark incessantly and loudly on any media platform available.
So the question is this – why would Wente write a column that so
closely resembles one written by her New York counterpart that many, including
the NYTPicker, are suggesting she stole it? Was she reckless, careless or was she
just short of an idea at the end of July when the summer news doldrums
typically strike? Did she believe that
she was writing an original view on a subject worth commenting on? Or was it just a bizarre coincidence? When
asked for an interview, Wente replied via e-mail, saying she was out of the country until after Labour
Day and apologized for being unavailable.
The NYTPicker
wasn’t the first to notice the two columns, just the first to write about them.
But so many readers are discussing the similarities, that becomes a problem in
itself. Perhaps a columnist with a lower profile could get away with writing a
column with such an alarming number of similiarities because no one would
notice. But the fact that so many Globe readers are also NYT readers made it
inevitable the two columns would be noticed and discussued – and not in a way
that’s flattering to Wente. As Ricky Ricardo used to say to Lucy, she’s got
some “’splainin” to do.
Poet T.S. Eliot has famously said that good
artists “borrow” but great artists “steal.”
He may have been thinking of William Shakespeare who has been cited as a
shameless stealer of plots so often that it’s tiresome. Eliot, however, was referring to works of
art, not journalism, while Shakespeare’s genius lay in using stolen plots as
vehicles to examine the mysteries of the human condition and to create poetry
and drama in a way that made them uniquely his.
Writer Malcolm Gladwell examined the notion
of plagiarism and when it’s okay to borrow, even steal, in a New Yorker piece
titled Something Borrowed .
He decided he was flattered, not offended, when British playwright Bryony
Lavery wrote a play, Frozen, that
included almost verbatim material, including dialogue, from a Gladwell
profile. “Instead of feeling that my
words had been taken from me, I felt that they had become part of some grander
cause, ” Gladwell wrote. Playwright
Lavery, who was pilloried when the “theft” emerged, said she never thought to
attribute the material for the Tony-nominated Frozen. “It never occurred to me to ask you,” she told Gladwell. “I
thought it was news.” She meant that
news, which is (presumably) true, can’t be stolen.
The
thing is, neither Dowd nor Wente is a poet or a dramatist. They are both high-profile, often controversial, columnists who are showcased on the op-ed pages
of their respective newspapers. Wente may not have lifted any word-for-word
sentences from Dowd’s column, but the similarities are so close that she’s
skating on perilously thin ice. For starters, both open with a first-person
anecdote of a close call with death while driving and talking on a cell phone.
Both go on to outline the risks of using one while at the wheel.
Wente also uses, without acknowledgement, a quote that’s used in the Dowd
column. Although Dowd herself credits fellow Times
colleague and reporter, Matt Richtel, for what she uses from his interview with
Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey, Wente doesn’t.
Dowd: As
John Ratey, the Harvard professor of psychiatry who specializes in the science
of attention, told The Times’s Matt Richtel for his chilling series, “Driven to
Distraction,” using digital devices gives you “a dopamine squirt.”
Wente: Every
time we phone or thumb or text or Twitter, we get what Harvard psychiatrist
John Ratey calls a dopamine squirt.
Wente also leaves readers with the
impression that she interviewed U.S. psychologist David Strayer. If she did,
she doesn’t say so. The Strayer material also appears in a Times article earlier
in the year.
Most journalists know that failure to
mention the time and place of an interview can be code for the fact that the
material isn’t being reported by the writer but has been taken from somewhere
else. Many readers, however, don’t.
The Globe’s own style book addresses these
points. Under the heading Plagiarism:
“Excerpts from other people’s prose must be attributed so as to avoid
even a suspicion of copying . . . Any extensive unacknowledged use of another’s
words, structure or ideas may constitute plagiarism” (page 470 – ninth edition).
In the past, Wente herself has taken a hard
line on plagiarism, including in a column that ran Jan.15, 2008: “Sadly,
high expectations are deeply out of fashion in Ontario. Students are no longer
penalized for such lapses as plagiarism or skipping tests.”
Coming up with fresh and interesting
columns every week can be challenging, as anyone who has ever written one knows.
Many have failed. Columnists, like readers, face a tsunami of information every
day and must decide what’s topical and merits comment. There’s also the rush to
meet deadlines and the sheer number of pieces that must be produced in a year.
While reporters are often assigned to
“match” a story that has already appeared somewhere else, columnists are never
assigned to “match” a column. They are
free – in fact privileged – to comment
on whatever they choose. And many news events are of so much interest to so
many people that many columnists can’t resist weighing in. Was there a news
columnist in North America who didn’t write about Sarah Palin?
While it would be easier, not to mention
cheaper, for less ambitious papers than the Globe to run syndicated columnists
(such as Dowd), original columnists can be a powerful draw for a newspaper and
help distinguish its “brand,” particularly in an age when information is so
readily available.
Wente’s profile and stature make it
inevitable that the bar will be set higher for her than it may be for an average
columnist. And it should be. If the Globe
is aiming to sell its credibility, its columnists must not only be credible,
but be seen to be, if the newspaper’s “brand” is going to have value.
jeopardizes the credibility of not only the columnist, but the newspaper. And in these difficult days for newspapers,
credibility is as important as ever, if not more so.
Wente’s decision not to comment because
she’s out of the country is a mistake. She owes readers an explanation.
Anne McNeilly is an assistant professor at
Ryerson University’s School of Journalism who has more than 25 years experience
as a journalist, including 18 years at The Globe and Mail.
August 27, 2009
If the Harvard professor’s
If the Harvard professor’s use of the term “dopamine effect” has been cited in several publications, then it is common knowledge and perhaps Wente’s reference to it should not be considered plagiarism.
If term appeared only in the NYT interview and in Dowd’s column, then the Globe has a problem.
August 28, 2009
For what it’s worth, a senior
For what it’s worth, a senior Globe manager told me the anecdote with which Wente leads her column several days in advance of our spring journalism gala at Conestoga College on March 19 of this year. I had asked for some amusing or interesting yarn with which to introduce Wente, who was guest speaker at the gala, and the Globe manager complied. I went on to tell the story that night. This fact doesn’t absolutely absolve Wente, but it does indicate that the story was alive and well and circulating among Wente’s acquaintances long before Dowd ever penned her column.
August 28, 2009
This is total nonsense.
This is total nonsense. Columnists feed off of each other all the time. You make it seem like this is the first time it has happened. I am not saying that Wente picked up on Dowd’s column but so what if she did? That does not constitute plagiarism. Wente is smart enough to realize the common audience of Globe and NYTimes readers. She knows her audiences might be the same people who read Dowd. So she read the column and decided to write about the subject. It turns out her views are close to Dowd. Is this a crime? If so, I could provide a long list of people who would be equally guilty.
August 29, 2009
I see some similarities in
I see some similarities in the columns but not actual plagiarism as such. Too much is being made of this situation.
August 29, 2009
The problem is not that she
The problem is not that she gained inspiration from Dowd, but that she lifted directly without attribution. I find it highly unlikely she got the same responses from the same sources as the NYT.
I’m less certain on what I think about the structural similarities, but the unattributed quotes are just wrong.
August 30, 2009
Interesting, given the
Interesting, given the accusations of plagiarism that dogged Dowd earlier this summer.
September 3, 2009
Globe Editors were informed
Globe Editors were informed of issues in these two articles by Margaret Wente on May 6, 2009.
In “The bad-paper trail: Where are the toxic assets?” (May 2, 2009), Wente wrote of Hernando de Soto: “For his challenge to the status quo, the Shining Path, the Peruvian Marxist terrorist group, targeted him for assassination. His offices were bombed and his car was machine-gunned. Today, the Shining Path is moribund, and Mr. de Soto continues his passionate mission”.
Almost identical wording from The Cato Institute: “ For his efforts, the Peruvian Marxist terror group Shining Path targeted him for assassination. The institute’s offices were bombed. His car was machine-gunned. Today the Shining Path is moribund, but de Soto remains very much alive and a passionate advocate…”
Cato Institute: “Delivering formal property rights to the poor can bring them out of the sway of demagogues and into the extended order of the modern global economy”.
Wente: “Mr. de Soto argues that delivering formal property rights to poor people can bring them out of the sway of demagogues and into the modern global economy…”
http://www.cato.org/special/friedman/desoto/index.html
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In “Not every girl can be a winner” (also May 2, 2009), Wente denounced the Girl Guides for introducing “body image” badges to combat anorexia.
Wente offers up a few quotes, without identifying where she obtained them. NYU’s journalism school describes why an example of an un-attributed quote is plagiarism: ‘because the way it is written, it appears the writer interviewed (the subject) and got that original quote, when it originated in (another publication)’. In other words: “Attribute any time you are using someone else’s words. Attribute when you are reporting information gathered by other journalists”.
http://journalism.nyu.edu/ethics/handbook/cardinal-sins/
Two of Wente’s quotes appeared in a 2004 article by Frank Stephenson in Research in Review, and a shortened version, called “The Rise and Fall of Self-Esteem”, appeared in Muse, a small independent magazine in 2005.
Frank Stephenson: “Or so says Martin Seligman, an outspoken critic of the self-esteem movement. Seligman considers self-esteem exercises a menace to society… ‘What I think has gone wrong,’ Seligman says, ‘is that we now think we should inject self-esteem directly into our young people, as opposed to producing warranted self-esteem, which I believe comes from doing well with the people you love, doing well in sports, [and] doing well in school.'”
Wente: “Among the biggest critics of the self-esteem movement is cognitive psychologist Martin Seligman. ‘We now think we should inject self-esteem directly into our young people, as opposed to producing warranted self-esteem, which I believe comes from doing well with the people you love, doing well in sports, doing well in school,’ he said. In his view, self-esteem exercises are a menace to society”.
Wente does not credit Stephenson’s article for this quote, and the words she uses to describe Seligman’s views – “self esteem exercises are a menace to society”, seem to be those of Stephenson, whose article also summarizes the work of his colleague Roy Baumeister, who Wente also quotes.
Frank Stephenson: “As a graduate student Baumeister had accepted claims for the benefits of self-esteem uncritically… Baumeister set out to answer the…question, ultimately publishing several even-handed appraisals of self-esteem…’People who have elevated or inflated views of themselves tend to alienate others,’ the report states.”
Wente: “‘People who have elevated or inflated views of themselves tend to alienate others,’ wrote social psychologist Roy Baumeister, who used to believe in the importance of instilling self-esteem, until he reviewed all the research”.
The Baumeister quote is buried in a report authored by him, Jennifer Campbell, Joachim Krueger, and Kathleen Vohs, but appears as a header in the articles by Stephenson. Wente uses the highlighted quote, attributing it to Baumeister, without crediting the report or its other authors, and again without citing the articles by Stephenson.
Wente claims that the Guides’ decision to introduce badges related to healthy body image is a bad idea, and that this is supported by research. She omits, however, the most relevant findings noted in Stephenson’s article (and the research it summarizes) which directly contradict her claim, and which specifically note the importance of self-esteem as it relates to body image and anorexia.
Frank Stephenson: “But low self-esteem does play a substantial role in eating disorders, a big problem, particularly for young women. Today’s teen and college-aged women face a national epidemic of anorexia and bulimia, two closely associated emotional disorders that can be fatal if not treated. A great deal of evidence indicates that feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing-low self-esteem-are in fact risk factors in disordered eating, Baumeister’s report noted. Work by Kathleen Vohs, one of the report’s authors, for example, found that bulimia is strongly associated with low self-esteem”.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090502.COWENT02ART2013//TPStory/National
http://www.rinr.fsu.edu/summer2004/summer2004.pdf
http://www.blnz.com/news/2008/04/23/Rise_Fall_Self-Esteem_0552.html
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090501.wcowent02/BNStory/specialComment/home
September 8, 2009
Thanks for that information,
Thanks for that information, Carol. This situation seems chronic. Any word on what the Globe is doing to address this?