Speaking My Mind

Proper attribution of quotations is a tricky thing. Too much information, and it can sound clunky. Too little, and it can be misleading at best, and, at worse, down right plagiarism. The guiding principle, aside from the moral one of giving credit where credit is due, is sometimes called CYA (not to be confused with this CYA). Really, if you’ve gotten something wrong in a paper or a report, and you didn’t do the research personally, why take the fall? Leave a citation trail, and you’ll know who to blame. Sounds like smart scholarship.

Here’s an example of an interesting, intelligent, and, yes, slightly convoluted example from The New York Times:

“The Great Game,” a cycle of plays commissioned from a dozen writers, opened in London in 2009 and has been touring the United States since August. The company did a . . . private performance for Britain’s Ministry of Defense in July, and a news release from the theater quoted the country’s top military commander, Gen. Sir David Richards, as saying that if he had seen the plays before he went to Afghanistan in 2005 it “would have made me a much better commander” of the international security forces.

Staggering comment from the British general, right? I mean, rarely are the arts given so much power to affect world affairs. Notice that the Times didn’t interview General Richards – it credited the quote to a press release put out by the producing theater. CYA in action.

Here’s an example on the other end of the spectrum. While every other news outlet, it seems, credited The New York Times with sending Diana Henriques to interview Bernie Madoff from his jail cell down in North Carolina (see here and here for two examples), guess who didn’t? The New York Post – owned by Rupert Murdoch, who has well known designs on taking down the Times. Here is the relevant part of the Post’s version:

Breaking his silence, Ponzi fiend Bernie Madoff said in a jailhouse interview that the big banks and hedge funds he did business with while orchestrating his $65 billion fraud knew or should have known that the astonishing profits his investments yielded were based on fraud.

“They had to know,” Madoff told author Diana Henriques, who is writing a book on the scandal. “But the attitude was sort of, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know.'”

At first glance this might seem fine. Heroic, even. Why not credit the author directly instead of the publisher? But this was Madoff’s first interview for publication since being locked up in 2008, and it first appeared on the front page of the Times print edition. It’s a big scoop. The Post likely didn’t get their information directly from the Ms. Henriques, they got it from the Times. If Ms. Henriques had made any sort of factual error, you can be sure the Post’s editors would have faulted the Times in an attempt to C their A. Upon further reflection, it actually feels like an unethical attempt by the Post to cut an arch rival out of the picture.

In fact, there already has been one claim of factual error in the interview, as reported on Bloomberg.com. The dispute is whether or not Irivng Picard, the man in charge of recovering Madoff funds on behalf of his victims, ever actually visited Madoff in prison. Notice the importance of a paper trail in establishing who said what:

“At no time did any meeting between the two take place and there has been no direct communication between them at any time,” [Picard’s chief counsel, David] Sheehan said.

The Times story quotes from an e-mail it said Madoff sent on Dec. 29, in which Madoff allegedly wrote “my information to Picard when he was here established” that banks “were complicit in one form or another.” Later in the article, written by Diana B. Henriques, the Times said Picard made settlements with other Madoff investors “after Mr. Picard’s trip to the prison here in Butner.”

Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for the Times, said the newspaper had changed the version of the story on its website and was preparing a correction for tomorrow’s print edition.

From this it would seem like Madoff is the source of the incorrect claim, and not Ms. Henriques. Times 1, Madoff 0, Post -1. The Post gets negative points because Madoff has no credibility to begin with – the Post keeps insisting that they do.

And just so you can’t say I didn’t say, I first learned of the Post’s failure from the “In the Papers” segment on NY1.

Couldn’t have planned it better!

Today in class we talked about how to construct arguments. You know: claim, reason, evidence. That’s the core. But a thoughtful argument should acknowledge limitations on the claim and offer a response. That’s the theory.

In practice, it doesn’t always work that way. Certainly not in politics, where many politicians are loathe to admit any limitations on their claims, lest they give ammunition to their critics.

And, lo and behold, what do I read in today’s NY Daily News, but this article on life at MSNBC after Keith Olbermann’s departure. It seems that acknowledging limitations on claims doesn’t make for such good TV either:

For those who haven’t been keeping score at home, the [talk TV] game in its purest form goes like this:

Hosts start with a set of facts. They pick the ones that support their views. They deliver them with a tone of gathering drama, urgency, humor, irony and sarcasm that ridicules anyone who disagrees.

It’s a simple formula that’s deceptively hard to execute well. For one thing, you lose points if you seem to acknowledge too openly that there could be gray areas, or that the other side could have a point.

Just to be clear, the article isn’t singling out MSNBC for playing this game exclusively. Hardly. It’s just using the vacancy at MSNBC to speculate what kind of a commentator will take Olbermann’s place. In fact, as this sarcastic quote makes clear, there are times at which pundits do recognize gray areas:

…hard-core lefty listeners will have to work with a couple of hosts, like [Lawrence] O’Donnell and Chris Matthews, who occasionally say those dreaded words “but on the other hand.”

For anyone interested in Fox News’ own special brand of talk TV denial, take a look at this hilarious clip from The Daily Show on the use of the word “Nazi.”

Always nice to see that what we’re learning in class is being discussed in the real world.