Much Ado About Something

Seems great offence has been taken by those in the business of reporting news and engaging in investigative reportage at the intrusive busy-bodyness of a blogger, Carol Wainio, at mediaculpapost.blogspot.com.  Who has the effrontery to identify and report on sloppy journalistic techniques.

 Let's face it, no one likes to be called on sloppy practices, particularly when they are viewed - and view themselves as professionals.

So the question is:  Is it professional for a journalist to incorporate remarks made by someone else without enclosing them in quotes?  Even though that alleged culprit, none other than The Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente, a veteran journalist who surely should know better, attributed authorship within the content of the article?

Neither professional nor ethical.  For in inserting a quote, a statement written by someone else, in its entirety as a thought or a conclusion without the quotes, is to claim it for oneself.  Nothing distinguishes it as being foreign to the writer's own scribbling, there is nothing to have it stand out, apart and acknowledging it as the work of someone else.

That omission can only be the result of either inexcusable sloppiness, inconsistent with professionalism, or the result of a deliberate wish to leave an impression that the unattributed statement was her own. 

Ms. Wente excerpted a few sentences from a book she purportedly admired, Starved for Science, by Robert Paarlberg, a Harvard professor.  Took those excerpts and incorporated them into her own column, an approving one of the book's conclusions.

That she wrote within the column of the author, his book and his research findings is irrelevant to the fact that those lifted statements were not distinguished and clearly marked as his own original writings, not hers.

To omit the clarifying quotation marks is to utterly disregard writerly etiquette at best; representing the commission of an ethical failure at worst.  Perhaps both.

It may seem like a quibble, like a small thing, to be overlooked  The editors of The Globe and Mail happen not to have regarded it in that light when the matter was brought to their attention by Carol Wainio, and they undertook to 'discipline' their staff journalist. 

Said discipline should serve to remind the veteran journalist of her obligation to fair play.

But the episode has been picked up by those who support Ms. Wainio's thesis of obligations having to be met, or on the other hand, those who support Ms. Wente's lax attitudes on attribution.

Is it reasonable to assume that even those who support Ms. Wente's failing would themselves never stoop to such laxity, but are expressing their professional compassion for a fallen comrade?