Sifting Through The Ashes Of Margaret Wente, Plagiarism And The Cult Of Celebrity Columnists

A Commentary by Doug Draper

Column writing is one vocation that is guaranteed to come with its highs and lows. It hardly matters how well or responsibly a column is researched and written, or what position the columnist may take on an issue, the highs and lows are a given.

As someone who has written columns for newspapers and magazines for the better part of my 33 years as a journalist, I have experienced my share of both.

There have been the highs when something I wrote may have contributed to a favourable outcome on some matter that has been troubling for people in the community. And there have been the lows that come with the inevitable email a columnist gets, more than a bit of it anonymous and quite crude, from those who take such issue with what I write that they want to see me burned alive or at least banished from the media forever.

Yet none of this comes close to the flogging Margaret Wente, an award-winning columnist for The Globe and Mail, has taken over the last week of this September. Then again, Wente has found herself in boiling water in recent days not for positions she has taken on issues, which have often inflamed lefties, but for accusations of committing something that can often be a career killer for a writer – plagiarism.

Wente’s troubles began when, on September 18, Carol Wainio, a professor at the University of Ottawa, posted a lengthy piece on her website, Media Culpa, titled ‘Margaret Wente – A Zero For Plagiarism?’ The post, which you can punch up and read in its entirety  at  http://mediaculpapost.blogspot.ca/2012/09/margaret-wente-zero-for-plagiarism.html , is as long as it is detailed because Wainio cited several examples of passages Wente appears to have lifted word for word or nearly word for word for her writing from other sources, and without attribution.

The Wainio piece was so damaging to Wente and her Globe and Mail employer that on September 25, The Globe (which had up to now branded Wente as one of its celebrity writers) ran a story in the front section of the paper headlined; ‘Globe takes action on allegations against columnist,’ and published a piece by Wente on its editorial pages the same day titled; ‘A columnist defends herself.’ In that piece, Wente confesses that she is “far from perfect.”

“I make mistakes,” continued Wente, “but I’m not a serial plagiarist. What I often am is a target for people who don’t like what I write.” Then near the end of the piece she writes; “I haven’t always lived up to my own standards. I’m sorry for my journalistic lapses, and I think that, when I deserve the heat, I should take it and accept the consequences. But I’m also sorry we live in an age where attacks on people’s character and reputation seem to have become the norm.”

I read and re-read what, for all we know, may be Wente’s last shot in the pages of The Globe to keep herself from sinking in a quick sand of charges that has drowned even better writers than so many other writers, and just about all I can think is this. Every time she began moving toward a moment of contrition that might cause many fair-minded people across the country to say something like; ‘Okay, It looks bad, but she’s had a pretty impressive record in the journalistic field., so let’s cut her a little slack,’ she turns around and paints herself as “a target for people who don’t like what I write.” In other words, she is being unduly attacked or persecuted.

Judging by the reaction to her column, which you can read in full at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/columnist-margaret-wente-defends-herself/article4565731/ ,  and the mess Wente now finds herself in (just do a search on Margaret Wente and scan the feedback from people below stories and columns on this matter in The Globe, The Toronto Star or National Post), her defensive strategy hasn’t scored her much by way of support. One of the tamer responses, as it fell short of saying ‘off with her journalistic head, was published as a letter to the editor in her own newspaper and concluded, and I paraphrase, that the next time the letter writer reads a column by Wente, one of the first questions he will ask is who wrote it. Ouch!!!

It was a bad week for Wente, indeed, and among other not so significant blows to her stature in the trade, she has been at least temporarily dropped from participating on a high-end media panel featured every Friday on CBC’s popular morning radio program Q. And while the Globe and Mail will not reveal what “disciplinary action” it says it has taken, it was impossible to ignore the fact that her column did not appear in the Focus section of the Saturday, September 29 edition of The Globe, where it is always so prominently featured unless she’s away on a holiday, in which case there is usually a note letting readers know she’ll be back. No such note this time. And her column was nowhere to be found on The Globe’s editorial pages again this October 2 where it usually appears on a Tuesday.

It is hard to imagine how Wente comes back from this. Given her high profile in the news business and all of the publicity this mess has received, it may be hard for The Globe, as much as it might hate to permanently sideline one of its star columnists, to begin publish her opinion pieces again without a good number of readers (or “customers,” as the corporate media has taken to calling any number of us who purchase their “products”). asking what the paper is doing recycling someone accused of ripping off other columnists’ lines. I’m not a betting person, but I would now put more money on U.S. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, given all his gaffes and lack of ability to connect with someone flipping burgers for Ronald McDonald or stocking shelves at Wal-Mart, turning the polls around in his favour than seeing another column by Wente on the pages of The Globe and Mail.

There are lessons to be learned here for everyone who runs media operations or reads the content with some trust that they are being treated to some thoughtful analysis from a writer who has done a bit of homework on whatever topic they are addressing.

One of the first lessons, and Wente said it herself in her September 25 column of defense is, as she put it; “Journalists know they’re under the microscope. If you appropriate other people’s work, you’re going to get nailed.” Perhaps if she had left it there instead of firing on with an uncharitable characterization of the individual who drew attention to several examples of sentences and paragraphs that originated elsewhere, she might be receiving a more charitable response from others today.

But getting back to the “you’re going to get nailed business,” Toronto Star national affairs columnist Tim Harper and others have more or less put it this way. All someone who suspects that a line in a column has been lifted from another source has to do these days is go to Google, key in the line, and bingo, more often than not, up pops the original source.

As Harper and other scribes have also reflected in the wake of Wente’s trial by fire, there is also the danger all of us who read and write have of subconsciously channeling something we read in an article or book that impressed us, and keying the idea or thought back as if it were our own. That is one of the reasons why, as a general rule, if I am working on a column on a particular issue, I stay away from reading columns some of my friends and readers send me on the same issue before I finish up mine, for fear that something in those columns strike me and I am tempted to adopt it as a talking point. Then again, echoing the same argument may not fall in to the same serious zone as lifting sentences, almost word for word, without attribution. 

I know this commentary is getting long – sorry about that but it is a subject I feel passionate about – so I will finish it up with just a few more points.

With newspapers in Canada in particular, and I am talking mostly about papers like The Globe, Toronto Star, Toronto Sun and National Post, there seems to be this cult of celebrity columnists who are on deck two or three times a week to comment on virtually everything simply because of who they are. There was Wente at the Globe, Rosie DiManno at The Star, Christie Blatchford, who has bounced back and forth from The National Post, to The Globe, and to the Post once again, who are given license, by virtue of hyper byline recognition, to comment on virtually anything. One day it may be the status of the British monarchy during the celebrations of the Diamond Jubilee, the next it may be the crisis in our schools or how good a job parents are doing of parenting or young people are doing of growing up to the challenges of today’s crazy world, and the next it might be on how well our governments are doing to responding to crises in the Middle East.

This is the latitude these celebrity columnist, who, by the way are paid wages and perks the average journalist at their papers can only dream of, have at these papers and one can only wonder how they can do it without doing a great deal of cutting and pasting of materials they find on the internet to get the job done. How much better it would be if news outlets ran opinion pieces by people who had some real grounding in the issue they are opinionating on.

In a great op-ed piece that ran in The Globe this past September 28 as at least a partial response to the Wente mess, Kelly McBride, described by the paper as a senior faculty member for ethics reporting at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida, wrote under the heading; ‘What we’ve got here is a failure of originality’; “We have no way of knowing whether, proportionally, there’s more plagiarism in journalism today than there was 20 years ago. But we do know that commentators now work in very different circumstances. It used to be that local columnists used the phone and their feet. They spent time out of the office, just like their reporter colleagues. They went to the bar, the barbershop, the local college, the courtroom. … Why? Because that’s where the ideas took shape. ….”

That doesn’t much happen anymore and one of the most worrisome reasons for that – at least it should be worrisome to people doing journalist and the larger public they serve – is that the corporations that have taken over most of our media outlets today are more interested in sucking up advertising dollars for their shareholders than investing money in their newsrooms and information gathering.

Yet ever more pressure is placed on a handful of columnists like Wente to crank out engaging pieces on whatever issue happens to be the flavor of the day. Under that kind of pressure, especially when these papers are bidding for a handful of celebrity columnists like a major league baseball team bids on the best home run hitter or pitcher, it might be awfully tempting to do some cutting and pasting of whatever quality material can be grabbed off the internet.

Is there a solution? Of course there is. Get away from the celebrity columnist given a license to write about anything. Stick to columnists who stick to areas that fall within their areas of expertise as reporters who have done their dues in the field covering these subjects. And do what The Globe appears to be doing since the Wente dust-up. Invite guest columnists to share provocative pieces on topical issues that they are living and breathing in their daily lives.

A piece The Globe ran on its editorial pages this Tuesday, October 2, in just about the place Wente’s column would normally run, on the Omar Khadr issue, titled ‘Testing Canada’s pledge to children of war’ by Sheema Khan, who submitted the piece to the paper, is a wonderful case in point.

This interesting replacement column, which you can check out by clicking on http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/omar-khadrs-return-will-test-canadas-commitment-to-war-children/article4577917/ . is a sample of how much more interesting the editorial pages of newspapers can be if their corporate owners got away from celebrity columnists like Wente and invested more in writers from their papers who have some street smarts around the issues they are offering their views on, and on quality quest columnists.

All of you out there – the readers and viewers of news media – have to be the first to insist on it.

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