Tuesday, March 19, 2002
Plagiarism
This friend got on my case about doing something to expose the untruths historians perpetrate by omitting references or providing references that cannot be traced. He brought on the case of someone proving that all this stuff about settlers having big concerns about rights to carry guns was wrong, that guns were not so important, that the big right-to-carry-gun is an NRA issue. Further, he twits me about T. Jefferson’s black progeny, that Sally Hemming’s kids were fathered by the great Tom’s brother Randolph or nephew Isham.
I have tracked the gun story. He’s talking about Prof Michael Bellesiles’s book "Arming America, The Origins of the National Gun Culture." It won the Bancroft Prize. Bellesile’s references cannot be verified., according to the American Spectator people who awarded Bellesiles the J. Gordon Coogler Award for the Worst Book for 2001, as stated by Bob Tyrrell of the Jewish World Review. Tyrrell himself is known to have supported the development of dubious facts about Wm. Jefferson Clinton in the 1990s Arkansas Project. That was when he was known as R Emmett Tyrrell Jr., editor-in-chief of the same American Spectator, a journal backed by Richard Mellon Scaife, the angel of many conservative propaganda efforts. Past Coogler awardees are Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker (twice), and Alan Dershowitz, for books supporting Clinton. However, there are also some more balanced publications who claim that Bellesiles’s reference work is bad, such as the National Review and the Boston Globe.
About Tom’s brother and nephew I know nothing. However, I can talk about the people who made up stories or copied stories without credit. In the invented news area, there has been a huge growth. Most recently, there’s Michael Finkel of NYT who did a composite (he states) of an enslaved African youngster, using an actual name that did not pan out. A bad embarrasment, and a career-killer at the NYT Sunday mag. But it is not unique, I recall Janet Cooke of the Washington Post producing a similar story about an eight-year old heroin addict that won the Pulitzer in 1981, embarrasing the Washington Post. There may be a movie about her some day.
Then there’s Pulitzer-Prize historian Joseph Ellis, who claimed to have been on the front lines of Vietnam, and to have stood with Martin in the civil rights struggle. Horrible self-aggrandisement.
The New Republic has had Stephen Glass who fabricated 27 of the 41 stories he wrote in 1995-98 and got to be known as an incredibly quick researcher, before being discovered, and young Ruth Shalit, who was accused of plagiarism and claimed incredible carelessness.
Rodney Rothman at The New Yorker produced a doozie, about walking into a dot.com office, claiming a desk and pretending to be an out-of-town employee on a temporary assignment. He got all kinds of privileges. Sheer fabrication, which we read with pleasure, but it should have been caught by the famous fact-checkers. Ah, well, the prestigious TNY that gives glamor to Newhouse also loses big bucks.
Mike Barnicle at the Boston Globe had an episode of fake news that caused his departure. He found a home at the Daily News in forgiving NYC. Don’t know the fate of Patricia Smith of the same venue. And at the Daily News, Michael Daly had to quit over the creation of a character out of sheer fiction.My favorite Slate fired Jay Forman over a story of catching monkeys with fishing lines in my favorite Florida Keys. Wow! I
Michael G, Gartner of NBC News resigned in 1993 after exposure of one of his news teams as hoaxters. I think it is all these term papers you can buy on the Internet and by mail order that foster the careless attitude towards facts and truth.
Stepping over to historians who do not acknowledge sources, Profs Stephen Ambrose, whose family team of book fabricators copy stuff verbatim ("Wilkd Blue" had many passaged from "Wings of Morning" by thomas Childers), and Doris Kearns Goodwin> She has three full and one part-time researcher filling her pages, and claims not to be able to recall what’s hers and what is someone else’s. Boilerplate history fabrication is shameless. Mck who wote the Adams book worked over every word. Shame on you TV tycoons..
This brings on original research. The same friend finds that pop psychologists do not credit, making their work subject to great doubt. I would suggest that this area is still full of "anecdotal research," as opposed to creditable research.
Let’s remember that the great Siggy, Freud to us unwashed, based the entire theory of ego, superego and id on one patient, the incredible Anna O. The entire theory of psychoanalysis, followed in the whole of the western world, based on one case. That’s anecdotal research to the utmost.
It may well be that psychotheorists still base their universals on skimpy evdence. But they are not Freud. Nobody’s Freud, maybe not even Freud at the margins. Research, statistics, is what science is founded upon. Brilliant conclusions based on single observations must be tested.
That brings me back to history. "Gotham, " by xx and yy, is a flashily written book, with references that cannot be tracked, with ease. History once was written with asterisks and footnotes, at the bottom of the page. That became too laborious, and not conductive to flashy writing, the type that attracts the young (see"youth culture," another article). So they stuck note pages, with references not traceable to specifics , at the end of the supposedly scholarly book. A compromise, but what the hell, the authors were after momey, not PHD acceditation, and the schools did not care, the departments said: "you’re writing, it counts, sloppy or not." It’s a new culture, right in there with Goodwin and Ambrose. American Academy, wake up. Your children are misbehaving. Set some standards. Culture is going down the toilet bowl. Academia is going right there with Anderson and other eructations of the youth culture. You are letting Howard Stern and Obie and Anthony set the standards. I have spoken.
I have tracked the gun story. He’s talking about Prof Michael Bellesiles’s book "Arming America, The Origins of the National Gun Culture." It won the Bancroft Prize. Bellesile’s references cannot be verified., according to the American Spectator people who awarded Bellesiles the J. Gordon Coogler Award for the Worst Book for 2001, as stated by Bob Tyrrell of the Jewish World Review. Tyrrell himself is known to have supported the development of dubious facts about Wm. Jefferson Clinton in the 1990s Arkansas Project. That was when he was known as R Emmett Tyrrell Jr., editor-in-chief of the same American Spectator, a journal backed by Richard Mellon Scaife, the angel of many conservative propaganda efforts. Past Coogler awardees are Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker (twice), and Alan Dershowitz, for books supporting Clinton. However, there are also some more balanced publications who claim that Bellesiles’s reference work is bad, such as the National Review and the Boston Globe.
About Tom’s brother and nephew I know nothing. However, I can talk about the people who made up stories or copied stories without credit. In the invented news area, there has been a huge growth. Most recently, there’s Michael Finkel of NYT who did a composite (he states) of an enslaved African youngster, using an actual name that did not pan out. A bad embarrasment, and a career-killer at the NYT Sunday mag. But it is not unique, I recall Janet Cooke of the Washington Post producing a similar story about an eight-year old heroin addict that won the Pulitzer in 1981, embarrasing the Washington Post. There may be a movie about her some day.
Then there’s Pulitzer-Prize historian Joseph Ellis, who claimed to have been on the front lines of Vietnam, and to have stood with Martin in the civil rights struggle. Horrible self-aggrandisement.
The New Republic has had Stephen Glass who fabricated 27 of the 41 stories he wrote in 1995-98 and got to be known as an incredibly quick researcher, before being discovered, and young Ruth Shalit, who was accused of plagiarism and claimed incredible carelessness.
Rodney Rothman at The New Yorker produced a doozie, about walking into a dot.com office, claiming a desk and pretending to be an out-of-town employee on a temporary assignment. He got all kinds of privileges. Sheer fabrication, which we read with pleasure, but it should have been caught by the famous fact-checkers. Ah, well, the prestigious TNY that gives glamor to Newhouse also loses big bucks.
Mike Barnicle at the Boston Globe had an episode of fake news that caused his departure. He found a home at the Daily News in forgiving NYC. Don’t know the fate of Patricia Smith of the same venue. And at the Daily News, Michael Daly had to quit over the creation of a character out of sheer fiction.My favorite Slate fired Jay Forman over a story of catching monkeys with fishing lines in my favorite Florida Keys. Wow! I
Michael G, Gartner of NBC News resigned in 1993 after exposure of one of his news teams as hoaxters. I think it is all these term papers you can buy on the Internet and by mail order that foster the careless attitude towards facts and truth.
Stepping over to historians who do not acknowledge sources, Profs Stephen Ambrose, whose family team of book fabricators copy stuff verbatim ("Wilkd Blue" had many passaged from "Wings of Morning" by thomas Childers), and Doris Kearns Goodwin> She has three full and one part-time researcher filling her pages, and claims not to be able to recall what’s hers and what is someone else’s. Boilerplate history fabrication is shameless. Mck who wote the Adams book worked over every word. Shame on you TV tycoons..
This brings on original research. The same friend finds that pop psychologists do not credit, making their work subject to great doubt. I would suggest that this area is still full of "anecdotal research," as opposed to creditable research.
Let’s remember that the great Siggy, Freud to us unwashed, based the entire theory of ego, superego and id on one patient, the incredible Anna O. The entire theory of psychoanalysis, followed in the whole of the western world, based on one case. That’s anecdotal research to the utmost.
It may well be that psychotheorists still base their universals on skimpy evdence. But they are not Freud. Nobody’s Freud, maybe not even Freud at the margins. Research, statistics, is what science is founded upon. Brilliant conclusions based on single observations must be tested.
That brings me back to history. "Gotham, " by xx and yy, is a flashily written book, with references that cannot be tracked, with ease. History once was written with asterisks and footnotes, at the bottom of the page. That became too laborious, and not conductive to flashy writing, the type that attracts the young (see"youth culture," another article). So they stuck note pages, with references not traceable to specifics , at the end of the supposedly scholarly book. A compromise, but what the hell, the authors were after momey, not PHD acceditation, and the schools did not care, the departments said: "you’re writing, it counts, sloppy or not." It’s a new culture, right in there with Goodwin and Ambrose. American Academy, wake up. Your children are misbehaving. Set some standards. Culture is going down the toilet bowl. Academia is going right there with Anderson and other eructations of the youth culture. You are letting Howard Stern and Obie and Anthony set the standards. I have spoken.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 3:36 PM 
