An anecdote on why you shouldn’t trust journalists
I imagine its somewhat obvious that I have a low opinion of the American journalist class. One of these days, I’ll get around to articulating my justified disgust of those cretins in a more complete manner, but here’s a story from my past that should give you an idea where I’m coming from.
Some time ago, I was dating a co-ed from one of the local colleges who was majoring in journalism. One evening after work, we were in my office, I reading a book on the recliner and she working on an assignment for one of her journalism classes. Her professor for this particular course (on newswriting) had a system by which the class was divided up into groups and tasked to put together a newspaper every four weeks consisting of stories the students wrote from real-life investigative reporting – getting facts, interviewing experts, and so on. The duties of writing stories (which pertained to specific issues in the local community), editing the paper, deciding what stories’ll be covered and whatnot rotated between the students, and it fell upon my girlfriend to put the paper together this time around.
Anyway, after finishing her editing and printing out the paper, I was getting up to put my book away and the story on the first page, about a proposal to build a certain big-box store in a nearby town, caught my eye. I asked to take a look and began browsing the paper, noticing that the story was strangely devoid of quotes from interviewees and was full of facts that weren’t attributed to any source. On a hunch, I suddenly went over to my computer and punched in one of the story’s lines, and the first hit was…Wikipedia. At least half of this “real-life” story, that was going to be turned in for a grade by a journalism student, was lifted directly off of the Wikipedia page for the big-box store in question. The writer had plagiarized from one of the most-read websites in the world and he hadn’t even bothered to shuffle the sentences around, swap paragraphs, or hide his crime in any way. What follows is my recollection of the conversation I had with my girl after discovering this:
Ferdinand Bardamu: Bad news – half of the front story on your paper’s been plagiarized from Wikipedia.
Girlfriend: So?
FB: SO? Isn’t plagiarism a violation of academic codes? You’re just going to turn in an assignment with a story that’s half-stolen from WIKIPEDIA?
GF: Everyone plagiarizes these days. At least half the people in my class steal their assignments from Wikipedia and other sites.
FB: If that’s the case, why doesn’t the professor fail all of the students, or report them to the dean’s office? That’s what’s he’s SUPPOSED to do.
GF: I don’t know. He’d probably end up flunking most of the class. He’s accepted assignments that were plagiarized in the past.
She was getting ready to go to class later, so I gave her back her paper and she kissed me goodbye. After she left, I poured myself a shot of Jack Daniels and flopped down on the couch to watch TV.
At a college of academic repute in the American Northeast, journalism students are turning in plagiarized work and their professors are giving them passing grades. I’m willing to bet money that this is quite common across the country. These are the people who are supposed to be giving us the news and keeping those in power accountable – and they’re spending their formative years turning in fabricated stories that they don’t even write themselves. I weep for the future.
I never did ask my girlfriend if she had ever plagiarized any of her assignments, though knowing her I wouldn’t be surprised. There are some interesting tales I have concerning her, but they’ll have to wait for another time…
That’s what they do when they graduate to.
When they graduate, they copy the Reuters and AP articles.
This makes sure that they don’t have any beliefs or facts that disagree with the establishment, and assures a unified front.
They can’t be serious. I get incessant plagiarism workshops and have to turn in all assignments into plagiarism detection software. Why should different academic standards apply across courses?
How common’s the problem? I think I’ve seen a link from Kassia Krozcer from you so may’ve read her coverage of a few cases in publishing.
There really needs to be a crackdown here on many institutions (publishers and institutions of academia) because it’s getting ridiculous and fairly preventable.
Journalists are just one rung above paedophiles.
Every single time I’ve witnessed an event and then read about it later, the journalist has been demonstrably wrong in both facts and interpretation.
Every single topic I know about in great detail and then read a journalist opine on, they have been brain dead and dishonest.
Every single time. I wouldn’t trust them to tell me the time of day.
When they’re not stealing from AP and Reuters, they’re lazily reprinting some corporate press release or repeating verbiage that some “government source” spoon fed to them. Original thought and work very rarely happens in journalism.
take it from someone who knows. this is systemic in other academic classes as well. the oddity….even at the high school level….when u confront a student for plagiarism…the parents will have the teacher explaining the failing grade in short order…..as though there are different definitions of plagiarism and cheating…..
1. Since most Journalism students will never have jobs in journalism, it hardly matters.
2. Since most humanities education programs at 4-year institutions are nothing more than degree mills, it hardly matters.
3. Since the very definition of “original work” in the undergraduate realm is meaningless, it hardly matters.
The point of higher education is to acquire knowledge and be able to apply it after graduation. The proof of that accomplishment is through the ability to demonstrate the retention of that knowledge and how to apply it. The humanities, being naturally weak on application, are also by nature weak on demonstration.
This calls into question the nature of original work. An undergraduate in software engineering is not expected to create his own programing language and environment and his product will likely look identical to all of his fellow students’ if they are to work correctly. Likewise, every mathematical proof of a known theorem will be verbatim what was in the text.
Do the humanities believe there is anything new about Shakespear’s plays that has not already been written? How many unique combinations of only 500 words are there to describe the exact same material, read by 10,000 students per year, each submitting his work to the plagerism software? Using the infinite monkeys principle, eventually, plagerism software will reject every new sumbission as a copy of something previous. 5 years ago, my wife already ran into this and had to rework her papers multiple times to get a product that would pass the software as “original”. What is the educational value in that? The only answer I can come up with is to make life easier on teachers who are not as smart as their students in applying modern internet search media and forcing the students to stay confined to 1970′s college practices, because the teachers are unable to adapt otherwise.
Most times outright plagiarism results in a D, not an F.
Let me take a guess where this occurred:
Colgate
What were you expecting from stenographers?
Bhetti:
No idea, but like I said, it could be so commonplace as to be utterly banal. My hunch is that with the transformation of American higher ed into a business, professors don’t flunk students en masse because that means the college won’t be able to leech off of them in the form of student loans.
OneSTDV:
Really? When I was in college, the professors and the administration made a big stink about plagiarism, threatening to subject students to academic review and expel them.
Nope.
Look up the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect regarding the public tolerating bad journalism. Very interesting.
I think the laziness may be endemic to the journalism field. In my home town a local computer gaming company went through a rather messy break-up which resulted in a lawsuit between some of the employees and the management. Articles in the local paper made less than veiled hints that there was some sort of conspiracy by management to liquidate the company for their own economic gain. If the same paper had searched THEIR OWN ARCHIVES, they would have seen interviews with the owner of the company from barely a year earlier where he had talked about how the company stock would be sold in the event of closure. At the same time he also complained about how tired he was of mortgaging his house every time they started working on a new game.
The only conclusion was that the reporters covering the story were too lazy to punch in a few search terms on their own internal database prior to listening to the evening news.
Journalists aren’t payed for telling the truth, they are payed for telling a sensationalist story and hyping up the cattle.
Then again, they just report the declarations, which are full of lies anyways. This year, I saw a newspaper reporting happily, with an straight face how the Student Council of my college “didn’t want to stop classes” after they SET TIRES ON FIRE ALL OVER THE AV. IN FRONT OF THE COLLEGE. I know because I saw it with my own eyes.
Never, ever trust a journalist.
One day a fourth-grade teacher asked the children what their fathers did for a living. All the typical answers came up — fireman, mechanic, businessman, salesman, doctor, lawyer, and so forth.
However, little Justin was being uncharacteristically quiet, so when the teacher prodded him about his father, he finally replied, ‘Okay…my father’s an exotic dancer in a gay cabaret and takes off all his clothes in front of other men and they put money in his underwear. Sometimes, if the offer is really good, he will go home with some guy and stay with him all night for money.’
The teacher, obviously shaken by this statement, hurriedly set the other children to work on some exercises and then took little Justin aside to ask him, ‘Is that really true about your father?’
‘No’, the boy said, ‘He actually works for the Democratic National Committee and helped get Barack Obama elected President last year, but I was too embarrassed to say that in front of the class.’
What, you think it’s just journalism departments that have such lax standards?
It’s all the departments, dude. I pissed away 4 years of my life in grad school, two years of them teaching and grading undergrads. The stories of incompetence and malfeasance I could tell you…
Journalists have are biased in favor of a big story. I saw an anti-globalization protest in downtown Denver about 8 or 9 years ago. It was a few hundred of the usual patchouli crowd and they didn’t really coalesce. It was just a lackluster group.
On the local tv news they shot everything fairly close up and they went out of thier way to make it look like an overpoweringly radical near-riot, though nothing happened. It was just a better story that way.
The bottom feeders in the intellectual trough, in order of least intelligent first.
1. Drama (acting)
2. Teachers (education majors)
3. Journalists (journalism and communications majors)
4. Political science majors.
5. Business majors.
Coincidentally, none of those careers actually requires a college education to get into the field nor is education an indicator of success in that field. So it seems the college merely exists to take the students’ money (parents’ money, banks’ money, taxpayers’ money).
Perhaps you should have titled this post “…Why You Shouldn’t Trust College Students,” or why you shouldn’t assume that people who go to college will be any smarter when they come out than before they went in.
But that’s of no importance. What concerns me most is this line:
“After she left, I poured myself a shot of Jack Daniels and flopped down on the couch to watch TV.”
My goodness fellow, go right ahead and drink JD until you pass out in your puke, but turn off that TV! Seriously. After you haven’t watched TV for a year or so, you’ll start to notice that you seem to be smarter than just about everyone around you. Without the constant distractions, your own mind will start to kick in. And next thing you know you’ll be forming original opinions for everybody else.
Going on 30 years without TV. I know what I’m talking about.
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