The Globe and Mail: Driving home a point about plagiarism

Since it seems we’re not to take Margaret Wente’s plagiarism overly seriously, what follows is likely acceptable at Canada's 'newspaper of record' as well.

I don’t read the Drive section. The similarity between Phil Patton's 2011 New York Times article on the iconic Jaguar E and one a few days later by The Globe’s  Jeremy Cato was pointed out (also noted in the Globe’s comments, and oddly, not scrubbed).  Worth checking - how often do you find a Museum of Modern Art curator mixed up with transmissions and torque?

Looking closely, the little discrepancies raise as many questions as the (at times) identical writing.  Christopher Mount was a curator at the MOMA when the Jag was purchased.  While there’s less identical overlap in this example, let’s start there (emphasis mine):

Patton: “The story was that Sayer could draw the optimal aerodynamic shape of a car to within a thousandth of an inch,” Mr. Mount said… In the brochure distributed when the E-Type was added to the museum’s collection, Mr. Mount wrote that “the car’s beauty and overall harmony of line arises from the universality of these mathematical proportions, which are by definition not subjective but absolute.” 

But the E-Type’s shape radiated a power that went far beyond any cold mathematical formulas.

Cato:  "Sayer was about drawing the optimal aerodynamic shape of a car to within a thousandth of an inch," said Callum in Geneva, pointing to the car. A MOMA brochure describes "the car's beauty and overall harmony of line" as arising "from the universality of these mathematical proportions, which are by definition not subjective but absolute."  Callum, though, was quick to say the E-Type is more than the product of cold mathematical formulas.

So at the beginning of the passage, the NYT quotes Mount about “optimal aerodynamic shape…”, while the Globe gives the words to Callum in Geneva. And at the end, the identical observation about “cold mathematical formulas” appears to be Patton’s prose in the NYT, and in The Globe, becomes Callum’s remarks again.  So who really said or wrote what?

There are lots of similarities; here’s one near identical bit:

Patton: “It is impossible to overstate the impact the E-Type had when it was unveiled,” said Ian Callum, the design director of Jaguar Cars, who as a young man fell under the spell of the E-Type and the XJ6 sedan.

Cato: "It is impossible to overstate the impact the E-Type had when it was unveiled," said Jaguar design director Ian Callum last week in Geneva. Callum as a young man fell under the spell of the E-Type and the XJ6 sedan …

Now it’s certainly possible that Callum repeated that quote at the Geneva Auto Show, but the same canned quote in the above passage appeared on Jaguar's website and in several articles months before the event.  Like the passage with Mr. Mount above, are these things that Callum “said” in Geneva, or not?  And given that the last identical bit about ‘a young man falling under its spell’ appears to be Patton’s original prose, what gives? 

More:

Patton: The E-Type was the successor, as its name suggested, to Jaguar’s C-Type and D-Type racecars, both of which had accumulated brilliant competition records, including a string of wins at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in the 1950s. 

A moncoque structure — derived from aircraft technology, it did not have a separate ladder-type frame — made the E-Type relatively light. It had disc brakes…and a clever suspension that made it agile.

Cato:  The E-Type was the successor to Jaguar’s C-Type and D-Type race cars, both of which enjoyed a string of wins at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in the 1950s ….  For instance, the monocoque structure, based on aircraft technology, was thoroughly modern and made the car very light. The disc brakes were race car-like and the clever suspension design made the E quick, responsive and agile.

Patton: Sayer’s approach was more scientific; he would withdraw to a private room at Jaguar to work, consulting his complex tables of numbers and formulas and outlining mysterious elliptical shapes…

Cato:  Sayer was not a designer as such, but more of a mathematician… He is said to have created the E-Type in a private room at Jaguar, consulting his complex tables of numbers and formulas and outlining mysterious elliptical shapes.

Patton: Robert Cumberford, a critic and historian of automobile design, tagged it “Phalliform Perfection”…

Cato:  Robert Cumberford, a critic and historian of automobile design who joined us on the stand in Geneva, says the car is the ultimate automotive expression of "Phalliform Perfection."

Cato’s mention of Cumberford as someone who “who joined us on the stand in Geneva” suggests his presence at the event – which amplifies the question; why is his article so similar, and at times identical, to Patton’s?   Here, again, the two close in a similar vein.

Patton: The country in 1961 still lived in the extended aftermath of wartime austerity.... But the first stirrings of the ’60s counterculture were visible...A new band called the Beatles performed for the first time at the Cavern in Liverpool…

Cato:  The E-Type… was also a product of an England which in 1961 finally found itself emerging from the suffocating grip of post-World War suffering and rationing. England in the 1960s was coming alive with music (The Beatles, the Rolling Stones to name two)...

Is it plagiarism?  Sure looks like it.  It would be for a student.  Does it matter?  It should.  And together with the way Margaret Wente’s repeated lapses were handled, it speaks to standards.

And as with Ms. Wente, it’s not just the un-attributed use of other peoples’ prose and/or quotes.  Like her scientist turned fisherman, student loan advertisement turned Occupy protester, Filipino peasant farmer turned Western “luminary”, figures from a Pew report that turn out to be from elsewhere, or her own borrowing from The New York Times, sloppy methods can lead to factual errors – or at least serious doubt about who said what.

Newspapers rely on public trust. Copying the New York Times doesn’t make The Globe and Mail like the New York Times.  And even if The Globe is now prepared to censor online comments to prevent anyone pointing this out, readers know it.

Margaret Wente: attribution, quotation marks?

Related content turned up the Pinker/Gladwell debate, and an older Wente article - ostensibly about Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers”. Again she shows herself to be a ‘fan’ of Steven Pinker (and another author). Don’t know if this was noted at the time, but since Ms. Wente thinks students get away with plagiarism too easily, one might ask whether turning in something like this would be acceptable.

Aside from a short section in quotes, some of Pinker’s (at times identical) wording is not included in quotation marks (see sections in bold caps).

Wente: Mr. Pinker… wrote: “The common thread in Gladwell's writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favour of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition” – explaining his appeal to both the Horatio Alger right (Mr. Gladwell is extremely popular on the Dilbert circuit) and the egalitarian left.

Pinker, NYT: The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition… this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left.

Earlier in the same NYT piece, Pinker uses the same expression Wente places in parentheses : a popular speaker on the Dilbert circuit.

Perhaps more problematical, Wente doesn’t summarize Gladwell’s wide ranging and eclectic book herself – it seems Pinker’s criticism of certain parts will do:

Wente: Mr. Gladwell claims that cognitive skills don't predict success, that intelligence scores do not relate closely to job performance and that above a minimum IQ of 120, higher intelligence doesn't bring greater intellectual achievements.

Pinker, NYT: It is simply not true that… cognitive skills don’t predict a teacher’s effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance or… that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievements.

Later, Wente drops in a paragraph which seemed odd, as she doesn’t strike one as an expert in Chinese agriculture. The paraphrased criticism is similar to one in a review by Peter Cocianis, an academic “completing a history of world rice production and the international rice trade since the seventeenth century”. But first, it’s worth noting how Wente sets up this little bit of Gladwell’s book (she reduces the several Asian examples Gladwell lists to just “China”):

Wente: “Mr. Gladwell's most tortured explanation for differing achievement is his effort to figure out why Chinese kids (as a group) are so much better at math than Western kids. The answer, he says, is found in centuries of rice-based agriculture”.

Gladwell on NPR: “’why is it that kids from Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong [and] China vastly outperform their American or Western counterparts in math,’ …Gladwell… says he found the answer in the agricultural tradition of rice farming”.

Wente: “This explanation makes sense only until you realize that rice isn't cultivated in the north of China, that other Asians are also good at math and that Chinese kids born and raised in North America retain much of their advantage”.

Peter Cocianis, Open Letters Monthly, April 2009: “…paddy rice has for millennia been the leading food crop on Java, in Thailand, in Burma, and in the Philippines… Do the inhabitants of rice-growing southern China outperform the inhabitants of northern China in math? As anyone with even a cursory sense of Chinese history knows, northern China for millennia has been a wheat/millet/small grain-producing region rather than a rice region”.

It’s reasonable to wonder if she borrowed that, and if so, whether she could have given the Chinese rice expert, and his publication, credit. As for Pinker, perhaps he wouldn't object - after all, she's a fan and helps him sell books. And maybe he doesn't need whatever he makes from a piece in the NYT.

*****

Context: Other attribution issues (aside from the most recent "John" debacle – which netted an Editor’s Note/clarification), are re-posted below, beginning with two the paper chose to address.

May 2011: In an article with a number of other borrowed, un-attributed quotes, Wente turns Dr. Mike Carron, a scientist at Mississippi State University, into a "fisherman".

Wente: “Red snapper are unbelievable right now,” one fisherman said. “You could put a rock on the end a string and they’d bite it.”

AP: "Red snapper are unbelievable right now," said Mike Carron, head of the Northern Gulf Institute in Mississippi. "Now you could put a rock on the end of string and they'll bite it."

Globe Correction: “A quotation about the abundance of red snapper in the gulf of Mexico, in a column of April 26, should have been attributed to Michael Carron, chief scientist of the Northern Gulf Institute”.

June 2011, Margaret and the New York Times:

Wente: …But it hasn't worked out that way, Mr. West writes. Instead, what we've built is a vast cultural dependency. Americans and Canadians are fighting and dying while the Afghans by and large stand by and do nothing to help them.

Dexter Filkins: …This isn’t happening. What we have created instead, West shows, is a vast culture of dependency: Americans are fighting and dying, while the Afghans by and large stand by and do nothing to help them.

Globe Correction, June 3: The words “Americans…are fighting and dying, while the Afghans by and large stand by and do nothing to help them” in the Focus section of March 12 should have been attributed to Dexter Filkins in the New York Times.

Unaddressed attribution: Wente and Helen Rumbelow, The Times, May 2011 (overlapping sections in bold caps):

Wente: ONE OF THE WORLD'S MOST AUTHORITATIVE SOURCES OF BREASTFEEDING RESEARCH IS MICHAEL KRAMER, PROFESSOR OF PEDIATRICS AT MCGILL UNIVERSITY. "The public health breastfeeding promotion information is way out of date," HE SAYS. THE TROUBLE IS THAT THE BREASTFEEDING LOBBY IS AT WAR WITH THE FORMULA MILK INDUSTRY, AND NEITHER SIDE IS BEING VERY SCIENTIFIC. "When it becomes a crusade, people are not very rational."

Rumbelow: ...ONE OF THE WORLD'S MOST AUTHORITATIVE SOURCES OF BREASTFEEDING RESEARCH: MICHAEL KRAMER, PROFESSOR OF PAEDIATRICS AT MCGILL UNIVERSITY, MONTREAL.

..."The public health breastfeeding promotion information is way out of date," KRAMER SAYS. THE TROUBLE IS, HE SAID, THAT THE BREASTFEEDING LOBBY IS AT WAR WITH THE FORMULA MILK INDUSTRY, AND "NEITHER SIDE IS BEING VERY SCIENTIFIC ... when it becomes a crusade, people are not very rational."

Wente and the Cato Institute website:

Wente wrote about Hernando de Soto in "The bad-paper trail: Where are the toxic assets?", Globe, May 2, 2009. Almost identical wording had appeared in de Soto's Cato Institute profile:

Wente: "delivering formal property rights to poor people can bring them out of the sway of demagogues and into the modern global economy…"

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: “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”.

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…”

And this.

Margaret Wente and the New York Times again: “Plagiarism or poetic licence”?

The question has been asked before. Following this and this, another recent article by the Globe and Mail scribe. The passage is short, but quite similar to a NYT book review.

Wente: …But it hasn't worked out that way, Mr. West writes. Instead, what we've built is a vast cultural dependency. Americans and Canadians are fighting and dying while the Afghans by and large stand by and do nothing to help them.

Dexter Filkins: …This isn’t happening. What we have created instead, West shows, is a vast culture of dependency: Americans are fighting and dying, while the Afghans by and large stand by and do nothing to help them.

**

Here again is a side-by-side comparison of one bit (from a previous post), with the overlap of prose in caps. Like Wente's identification error in another un-attributed quote (recently corrected), unclear attribution can produce other problems:

Wente: One of the world's most authoritative sources of breastfeeding research is Michael Kramer, professor of pediatrics at McGill University. "The public health breastfeeding promotion information is way out of date," he says. The trouble is that the breastfeeding lobby is at war with the formula milk industry, and neither side is being very scientific. "When it becomes a crusade, people are not very rational."

Rumbelow: ...one of the world's most authoritative sources of breastfeeding research: Michael Kramer, professor of paediatrics at McGill University, Montreal.

..."The public health breastfeeding promotion information is way out of date," Kramer says. The trouble is, he said, that the breastfeeding lobby is at war with the formula milk industry, and "neither side is being very scientific ... when it becomes a crusade, people are not very rational."

Even if one justifies the use of another journalist’s quotes, the prose overlap substantially exceeds them.

And aside from the overall similarity, that sentence, “The trouble is that the breastfeeding lobby is at war with the formula milk industry, and neither side is being very scientific”, raises other questions; given the migrating quotation marks in Wente’s version, the last six words change from being a recorded quote by Kramer in Rumbleow’s article, to (also) appearing as Wente’s prose in the Globe. Is that acceptable?