Margaret Wente on Ignatieff, power and Power

In one of the only bits of Margaret Wente’s column on Michael Ignatieff’s new book that doesn’t seem like a rehash of articles in the Toronto Star, the National Post and the Sun (there are 200 pages to choose from - why use the same quotes?), Wente describes Ignatieff's decision to enter politics like this:   “He wanted to stop being a spectator and be a player instead.  He longed to join the ranks of intellectuals like Vaclav Havel and Samantha Power, his Harvard pal who became Barack Obama’s ambassador to the UN…”.

The bit about Power is curious.  Ignatieff, (born 1947), was approached by Liberals to enter electoral politics in 2004.  By 2005, he'd made up his mind.

Samantha Power, born 1970, has never stood for elected office and was, like Ignatieff, a fellow writer/academic when Ignatieff decided to enter the fray and run for a seat and the Liberal leadership.  

While she later worked behind the scenes on Obama’s 2008 election campaign and served as a foreign policy advisor, Power was appointed UN ambassador in 2013, well after Ignatieff’s 2011 defeat and resignation.  How then, was Samantha Power an inspiration or model for Ignatieff’s decision to “stop being a spectator and be a player” ? 

In fact, some people have argued that it went the other way:  “Power was influenced by the Canadian intellectual Michael Ignatieff”.  Given the age difference and timeline, this makes more sense.

Compared to the plagiarism problems last year, the fake Occupy protester and other similar issues, this head scratcher is no big deal, but it does speak to the value of Wente’s observations.  Rather than curious tossed off claims like these, it would have been nice to see that she’d read Ignatieff’s book and was able to pull out and discuss passages that hadn’t already been covered elsewhere - especially in a column dealing with hubris and over-rated public intellectuals.  

Update:   This also now appears at the end of the column:  

Editor's note: This corrects an earlier version which said Bob Rae threw his support behind Stéphane Dion in the final leadership ballot in 2006.

Further Update on that puzzling Editor’s Note (perhaps an example of a grudging correction whose aim is not to set the record straight, but rather to limit the damage of the initial error). 

Wente originally said Rae threw his support behind Dion to prevent Ignatieff from winning the 2006 leadership.  Now the “corrected” version reads, “During the 2006 Liberal leadership convention he refused to release his delegates to his old friend, with the result that Stéphane Dion, not Mr. Ignatieff, won the race.” 

Reports about the 2006 convention however, indicate clearly that Rae “released his delegates”.  This means, obviously, that he released his delegates to vote as they saw fit on the final ballot.  Had Rae “refused to release his delegates” as The Globe now claims, Rae would have been obliged to ask them to support a particular candidate (unless he said, “I release you to vote for anyone but Ignatieff,” something which is pretty well unheard of, and which, from what I can determine, he did not do). 

To be truthful then, that Editor’s Note requires correction.

More on Wente, laziness and plagiarism, plus May and Monbiot

George Monbiot is a serious thinker. Too bad the Globe and Mail only has Margaret Wente. It’s remarkable how many words one can take from another writer, and still manage to distort them.

We’ve already looked at Wente and plagiarism here - where, along with various near identical passages, she casually re-assigns or invents identities – for example, turning Dr. Mike Carron, a scientist at Mississippi State University, into "a fisherman" in one of many un-attributed bits of other articles.

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."

Today’s piece on Elizabeth May again shows real effort at recycling, with Wente still being somewhat sparing with quotation marks:

Wente: “But as Mr. Monbiot writes, ‘The problem we face is not that we have too little fossil fuel but too much.’ As oil declines, economies will switch to oil sands, shale gas, coal and ultra-deep reserves”.

Monbiot: “The problem we face is not that we have too little fossil fuel, but too much. As oil declines, economies will switch to tar sands, shale gas and coal; as accessible coal declines, they'll switch to ultra-deep reserves.”

Why does Wente limit her quote to the first bit? To turn ‘tar sands’ into ‘oil sands’?

Or here.

Wente: “As Mr. Monbiot writes gloomily, ‘All of us in the environment movement – whether we propose accommodation, radical downsizing or collapse – are lost. None of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this mess.’ He hopes that by laying out the problem, he can encourage environmentalists to ‘abandon magical thinking’ and recognize the contradictions they confront”.

Monbiot: “All of us in the environment movement, in other words – whether we propose accommodation, radical downsizing or collapse – are lost. None of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this mess…I hope that by laying out the problem I can encourage us to address it more logically, to abandon magical thinking and to recognise the contradictions we confront.”

Again, why so stingy with those little things? They don’t take much space.

Wente offers little other than carefully skewed and selected Monbiot and cheap shots at May. The observations that seem to be her own are a bit wacky: “But greens neglect to mention that hundreds of millions of Chinese people have begun consuming stupendous quantities of brick, copper and manufactured goods in their rise from poverty – nearly all of it produced with fossil fuels”.

“Consuming stupendous quantities of brick… produced with fossil fuels”? Of all the things to complain about in China - brick?

In 2001 China announced a ban on traditional bricks made with fossil fuels, in favour of “using brick made of ash from power plants in cleaner kilns” - recycling the byproduct from coal plants, rather than using fossil fuels to produce clay bricks. China is apparently now a leader in “state of the art technology for brick manufacturing”, producing “energy efficient… flyash bricks as an alternative… to the commonly used burnt clay bricks, which use fossil fuel for their production”.

Now, "non-baked bricks account for 55-60 per cent of building materials used in China."

But the most spectacular dishonesty is Wente’s assertion that George Monbiot is Elizabeth May’s “biggest critic”. For this, her central argument, she produces not a single word from the man. One can’t find anything Monbiot has said that is “critical” of Elizabeth May. Nor does he refer to her as a “hyperactive chipmunk” with “a matchless ability to hog the spotlight”.

The two are most well known for debating together on the same side, in the Munk Debates on Climate Change. If Wente can substantiate her claim that Monbiot is May’s “biggest critic”, she should offer up some evidence. And please, Ms. Wente, try doing it the professional way, with quotes.

Margaret Wente: photo funnies, laziness, and plagiarism

I try to avoid Margaret Wente. "Mom, she's writing about the urban elites again", my son will yawn at breakfast. But the photo accompanying "Fear and loathing among the eastern elites" May 7, 2011) was curious. It showed how Wente's stock character, the 'snobby eastern urban elite', had "demonized" Stephen Harper. The unidentified photo illustrated the "vitriolic animosity" - "the hatchet job the Liberals have done" on Harper, and how poor Steven Harper is "routinely depicted as a cross between Darth Vader and Lord Voldemort".

I thought the picture of Harper with horns looked like something from a kid's Facebook page. So I checked. Unidentified and missing entirely from the online version (where there's a cartoon about Pakistan), the photo seems to be of this guy hiding behind John Baird - a grainy shot of an eco-activist at a 2007 demo in Stanley Park. Not "eastern", likely not "elite', and, if I had to guess, maybe anarchist or Green, rather than Liberal. Perhaps Wente doesn't choose her images, but this illustrates a deeper sloppiness.

Were the article to have used a Toronto G20 protestor instead of one from B.C., the problem remains; if you're going to complain about vitriolic demonizing, you can't compare the actions of some unsanctioned individual at a demo with the official advertising campaign of, say, the ruling party of Canada. They are not the same thing. To pretend they are is a bit like saying a squad of fully armed RCMP is equivalent to a lone guy with a stapler.

Andrew Coyne highlights the most interesting bit from Paul Wells' election post mortem- a gloating Conservative's analysis of their multi million dollar Ignatieff attack campaign:

'''They say that we try to portray Ignatieff in our ads and so on as a weak and flailing professor,' the war room staffer said. 'No, that’s how we portrayed Dion. Dion was weak, you know, Dion was ‘not a leader.’ …Michael Ignatieff, in our narrative, is a political opportunist who is calculating, who will do and say anything to get elected….He’s a schemer…He’s a malicious human being…that’s kind of the sentiment we’re getting at...With Ignatieff, it’s ‘He’s a bad man.'"

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure any defamation decision would be heavily influenced by whether the offending material was a handmade poster or a national advertising campaign in heavy rotation during the Academy Awards and the Superbowl. People would rightly see the damage from one as being qualitatively and quantitatively different from the other. That's 'natural justice' or (if you're an old-fashioned Mike Harris Conservative) "common sense". But Ms. Wente would have us believe they are the same thing.

Wells also describes how Patrick Muttart (later fired from Harper's 2011 campaign for allegedly shopping a fake photo of Ignatieff to Sun Media), "had the party register a website in Montenegro so its URL could be www.ignatieff.me, reinforcing the notion that the Liberal was 'just in it for me.' They stuffed it full of embarrassing old quotes. Ads ran for weeks on television and radio."

I thought some dumb kid had set up that site, but now we learn it was the PMO.

Is it elitist to say the picture in Wente's article is cheap? Wente, a private school gal with no kids, from a wealthy family, who hobnobs with the Bay Street set and writes for the most elite paper in the country, regularly tells us how anti-elitist she is. My definition of 'elitist' would be someone who is privileged, arrogant and lazy, and Wente is arguably all three.

Wente: Laziness or plagiarism?

Possible plagiarism has already been discussed. But there are lots of other examples, like this:

Wente writes 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…”

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I'd ignored Wente since finding a bunch of similar stuff in her articles a few years back, but a quick look at recent work shows she's still up to her old tricks.

Here are some bits from Wente's recent piece on the Gulf Oil spill:

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."

Lifting that quote from a 2010 AP report, Wente also turns Dr. Mike Carron, a scientist at Mississippi State University, into "a fisherman". Sloppiness, or anti-elitist reflex?

Wente: “People are having a hard time accepting it. Me, too,” says Ed Overton, a chemist at Louisiana State University. “There are things that are wrong. There is still oil out there. But it is not nearly as bad as I expected it would be a year later.”

Press Register: "People are having a hard time accepting it. Me too,” said Ed Overton, a chemist at Louisiana State University…. "There is still oil out there. But it is not nearly as bad as I expected it would be a year later.”

http://blog.al.com/live/2011/04/scientists_optimistic_but_caut.html

Wente: most scientists believe the Gulf is in surprisingly good shape. When three dozen of them were asked to rate the current health of the Gulf’s ecosystem on a 1-to-100 scale, they gave it an average grade of 68 – not bad, considering that, before the spill, they gave it a 71.

Fox: More than three dozen scientists grade the Gulf's big picture health a 68 on average, using a 1-to-100 scale. What's remarkable is that that's just a few points below the 71 the same researchers gave last summer when asked what grade they would give the ecosystem before the spill.

Even the Fox article, like the others, goes on to acknowledge that the Gulf is not in good shape, but Wente studiously avoids the thrust of each article she cribs from. Here's just one more early example:

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 quotes, without attribution. Two of them had appeared in a 2004 article by Frank Stephenson in Research in Review.

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 doesn't credit Stephenson' at all, even though the words she uses to describe Seligman’s views - “self esteem exercises are a menace to society”, are his.

Stephenson 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 long report co-authored by Jennifer Campbell, Joachim Krueger, and Kathleen Vohs, but it appears as a header in Stephenson's piece. Wente uses the highlighted quote, attributing it to Baumeister, without crediting the report's other authors, and again without citing Stephenson.

Wente claims that the Guides’ decision to introduce badges related to healthy body image is a bad idea, omitting the most relevant findings in Stephenson’s article, which contradicts her claim.

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

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I'm no expert on plagiarism or inadequate attribution, but Wente's practices seem not dissimilar to David Warren's, which the Ontario Press Council found lacking. And amongst academics and teachers whom Wente regularly faults for being soft on plagiarism, some examples from her own work would likely merit a fail. That she gets away with it perhaps indicates the different rules that apply to 'eastern urban elites'.