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Weiye Loh

Churnalism or news? How PRs have taken over the media | Media | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...churnalism-pr-media-trust

Public Relations News Newspapers Media Bias Representation Objectivity

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • The website, churnalism.com, created by charity the Media Standards Trust, allows readers to paste press releases into a "churn engine". It then compares the text with a constantly updated database of more than 3m articles. The results, which give articles a "churn rating", show the percentage of any given article that has been reproduced from publicity material.The Guardian was given exclusive access to churnalism.com prior to launch. It revealed how all media organisations are at times simply republishing, verbatim, material sent to them by marketing companies and campaign groups.

  • Meanwhile, an independent film-maker, Chris Atkins, has revealed how he duped the BBC into running an entirely fictitious story about Downing Street's new cat to coincide with the site's launch.

    The director created a Facebook page in the name of a fictitious character, "Tim Sutcliffe", who claimed the cat – which came from Battersea Cats Home – had belonged to his aunt Margaret. The story appeared in the Daily Mail and Metro, before receiving a prominent slot on BBC Radio 5 Live.

    BBC Radio 5 Live's Gaby Logan talks about a fictitious cat story Link to this audio

    Atkins, who was not involved in creating churnalism.com, uses spoof stories to highlight the failure of journalists to corroborate stories. He was behind an infamous prank last year that led to the BBC running a news package on a hoax Youtube video purporting to show urban foxhunters.

  • The creation of churnalism.com is likely to unnerve overworked journalists and the press officers who feed them. "People don't realise how much churn they're being fed every day," said Martin Moore, director of the trust, which seeks to improve standards in news. "Hopefully this will be an eye-opener."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Interestingly, all media outlets appear particularly susceptible to PR material disseminated by supermarkets: the Mail appears to have a particular appetite for publicity from Asda and Tesco, while the Guardian favours Waitrose releases.
  • Moore said one unexpected discovery has been that the BBC news website appears particularly prone to churning publicity material."Part of the reason is presumably because they feel a duty to put out so many government pronouncements," Moore said. "But the BBC also has a lot to produce in regions that the newspapers don't cover."
Weiye Loh

FleetStreetBlues: Independent columnist Johann Hari admits copying and pasting intervie... - 0 views

fleetstreetblues.blogspot.com/...ent-columnist-johann-hari.html

Journalism Objectivity Plagiarism Churnalism

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • this isn't just a case of referencing something the interviewee has written previously - 'As XXX has written before...', or such like. No, Hari adds dramatic context to quotes which were never said - the following paragraph, for instance, is one of the quotes from the Levy interview which seems to have appeared elsewhere before. After saying this, he falls silent, and we stare at each other for a while. Then he says, in a quieter voice: “The facts are clear. Israel has no real intention of quitting the territories or allowing the Palestinian people to exercise their rights. No change will come to pass in the complacent, belligerent, and condescending Israel of today. This is the time to come up with a rehabilitation programme for Israel.”
  • So how does Hari justify it? Well, his post on 'Interview etiquette', as he calls it, is so stunningly brazen about playing fast-and-loose with quotes
  • When I’ve interviewed a writer, it’s quite common that they will express an idea or sentiment to me that they have expressed before in their writing – and, almost always, they’ve said it more clearly in writing than in speech. (I know I write much more clearly than I speak – whenever I read a transcript of what I’ve said, or it always seems less clear and more clotted. I think we’ve all had that sensation in one form or another). So occasionally, at the point in the interview where the subject has expressed an idea, I’ve quoted the idea as they expressed it in writing, rather than how they expressed it in speech. It’s a way of making sure the reader understands the point that (say) Gideon Levy wants to make as clearly as possible, while retaining the directness of the interview. Since my interviews are intellectual portraits that I hope explain how a person thinks, it seemed the most thorough way of doing it...
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • ...I’m a bit bemused to find one blogger considers this “plagiarism”. Who’s being plagiarized? Plagiarism is passing off somebody else’s intellectual work as your own – whereas I’m always making it clear that (say) Gideon Levy’s thought is Gideon Levy’s thought. I’m also a bit bemused to find that some people consider this “churnalism”. Churnalism is a journalist taking a press release and mindlessly recycling it – not a journalist carefully reading over all a writer’s books and selecting parts of it to accurately quote at certain key moments to best reflect how they think.
  • I called round a few other interviewers for British newspapers and they said what I did was normal practice and they had done it themselves from time to time. My test for journalism is always – would the readers mind you did this, or prefer it? Would they rather I quoted an unclear sentence expressing a thought, or a clear sentence expressing the same thought by the same person very recently? Both give an accurate sense of what a person is like, but one makes their ideas as accessible as possible for the reader while also being an accurate portrait of the person.
  • The Independent's top columnist and interviewer has just admitted that he routinely adds things his interviewees have written at some point in the past to their quotes, and then deliberately passes these statements off as though they were said to him in the course of an interview. The main art of being an interviewer is to be skilled at eliciting the right quotes from your subject. If Johann Hari wants to write 'intellectual portraits', he should go and write fiction. Do his editors really know that the copy they're printing ('we stare at each other for a while. Then he says in a quieter voice...') is essentially made up? What would Jayson Blair make of it all? Astonishing.
  • Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11
     
    In the last few days, a couple of blogs have been scrutinising the work of Johann Hari, the multiple award-winning Independent columnist and interviewer. A week ago on Friday the political DSG blog pointed out an eerie series of similarities between the quotes in Hari's interview with Toni Negri in 2004, and quotes in the book Negri on Negri, published in 2003. Brian Whelan, an editor with Yahoo! Ireland and a regular FleetStreetBlues contributor, spotted this and got in touch to suggest perhaps this wasn't the only time quotes in Hari's interviews had appeared elsewhere before. We ummed and ahhed slightly about running the piece based on one analysis from a self-proclaimed leftist blog - so Brian went away and did some analysis of his own. And found that a number of quotes in Hari's interview with Gideon Levy in the Independent last year had also been copied from elsewhere. So far, so scurrilous. But what's really astonishing is that Johann Hari has now responded to the blog accusations. And cheerfully admitted that he regularly includes in interviews quotes which the interviewee never actually said to him.
Weiye Loh

Interview etiquette : Johann Hari - 0 views

www.johannhari.com/...interview-etiquette

Journalism Churnalism News Objectivity

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • occasionally, at the point in the interview where the subject has expressed an idea, I’ve quoted the idea as they expressed it in writing, rather than how they expressed it in speech. It’s a way of making sure the reader understands the point that (say) Gideon Levy wants to make as clearly as possible, while retaining the directness of the interview.
  • if somebody interviewed me and asked my views of Martin Amis, instead of quoting me as saying “Um, I think, you know, he got the figures for, uh, how many Muslims there are in Europe upside down”, they could quote instead what I’d written more cogently about him a month before, as a more accurate representation of my thoughts. I stress: I have only ever done this where the interviewee was making the same or very similar point to me in the interview that they had already made more clearly in print.
  • after doing what must be over fifty interviews, none of my interviewees have ever said they had been misquoted, even when they feel I’ve been very harsh on them in other ways.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Gideon Levy said, after my interview with him was published, that it was “the most accurate take on me anyone has written” and “profoundly moved him” – which hardly fits with the idea it was an inaccurate or misleading picture.
  • one blogger considers this “plagiarism”. Who’s being plagiarized? Plagiarism is passing off somebody else’s intellectual work as your own – whereas I’m always making it clear that (say) Gideon Levy’s thought is Gideon Levy’s thought. I’m also a bit bemused to find that some people consider this “churnalism”. Churnalism is a journalist taking a press release and mindlessly recycling it – not a journalist carefully reading over all a writer’s books and selecting parts of it to accurately quote at certain key moments to best reflect how they think.
  • I called round a few other interviewers for British newspapers and they said what I did was normal practice and they had done it themselves from time to time. My test for journalism is always – would the readers mind you did this, or prefer it? Would they rather I quoted an unclear sentence expressing a thought, or a clear sentence expressing the same thought by the same person very recently? Both give an accurate sense of what a person is like, but one makes their ideas as accessible as possible for the reader while also being an accurate portrait of the person.
Weiye Loh

Johann Hari denies accusations of plagiarism | Media | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...johann-hari-twitter-plagiarism

Journalism Churnalism Plagiarism Objectivity

shared by Weiye Loh on 29 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • "It's clearly not plagiarism or churnalism – but was it an error in another way? Yes. I now see it was wrong, and I wouldn't do it again. I'm grateful to the people who pointed out this error of judgment."
  • when contacted by the Guardian, Levy said he was not unhappy: "I stand behind everything that was published in the interview, which was an accurate representation of my thoughts and words."
  • Hari's interview read: "With a shake of the head, he says: 'We had now two wars, the flotilla – it doesn't seem that Israel has learned any lesson, and it doesn't seem that Israel is paying any price. The Israelis don't pay any price for the injustice of the occupation, so the occupation will never end. It will not end a moment before Israelis understand the connection between the occupation and the price they will be forced to pay. They will never shake it off on their own initiative.'"In July 2007, Levy wrote something very similar in a column for Haaretz: "The Israelis don't pay any price for the injustice of the occupation, so the occupation will never end. It will not end a moment before the Israelis understand the connection between the occupation and the price they will be forced to pay. They will never shake it off on their own initiative, and why should they?"
Weiye Loh

Johann Hari and the tyranny of the 'good lie' – Telegraph Blogs - 0 views

blogs.telegraph.co.uk/...nd-the-tyranny-of-the-good-lie

Plagiarism Journalism Churnalism

shared by Weiye Loh on 02 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Hari admits to substituting his interviewees’ written words for their spoken words, quoting from their books and pretending that they actually said those words to him over coffee. But that is okay, he says, because his only aim was to reveal “what the subject thinks in the most comprehensible possible words” and to make sure that the reader “understood the point”.
  • The nub of Hari’s argument is that reality and truth are two different things, that what happens in the real world – in this case a chat between a journalist and some famous author or activist – can be twisted in the name of handing to people a neat, presumably preordained “truth”. It is a cause for concern that more journalists have not been taken aback by such a casual disassociation of truth from fact.
  • the sad fact is that the BS notion that it is okay to manipulate facts in order to present a Greater Truth is now widespread in the decadent British media. Mark Lawson once wrote a column titled “The government has lied and I am glad”, in which he said it was right for the British authorities and media to exaggerate the threat of AIDS because this “good lie” (his words) helped to improve Britons’ moral conduct. When Piers Morgan was sacked from the Mirror for publishing faked photos of British soldiers urinating on Iraqi prisoners he said it was his “moral duty” to publish the pictures because they spoke to an ugly reality in Iraq. When this month it was discovered that the Syrian lesbian blogger was a fake, some in the media who had fallen for “her” made-up reports said the good thing about the blog is that it helped to “draw attention to a nation’s woes”. And now Hari says it doesn’t matter it he invents a conversation because it helps to express a “vital message” in the “clearest possible words”.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The idea of a “good lie” is a dramatically Orwellian device, designed to deceive and to patronise. A lie is a lie, whether your intention is to convince people that Saddam is evil and must be bombed or that Gideon Levy is a brainy and decent bloke. Lying to communicate a “vital message”, a liberal and profound “truth”, is no better than lying in order to justify a war or a law’n'order crackdown or whatever.
Weiye Loh

New Statesman - Johann Hari and media standards - 0 views

www.newstatesman.com/...johann-hari-media-consistency

Journalism Churnalism Plagiarism Politics

shared by Weiye Loh on 29 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Consistency is a virtue. One cannot attack - in any principled terms - the reactionary and the credulous, the knavish and the foolish, for a casual approach to sources, data, and evidence, or for disregarding normal journalistic standards, if when it is a leading liberal writer that is caught out it is somehow exceptional. It simply smacks of shallow partisanship.
  • inconsistency also undermines the normative claims for the superiority of a liberal and critical approach.How can one sensibly call out the "other side" on any given issue in terms which one would not apply to one's "own side"?
  • Weiye Loh on 29 Jun 11
     
    now that Johann Hari has apologised, one wonders if many who rushed to his support should apologise too. There were many liberal, rational, and atheistic writers and pundits who defended him on Twitter on terms they would never have extended to a conservative, religious, or quack writer or pundit exposed as making a similar sort of mistake. Naming names would be inflammatory; and they, and their followers, know who they are. What is important here is the basic principle of consistency and its value. Just imagine had it been, say, Peter Hitchens, Garry Bushell, Richard Littlejohn, Rod Liddle, Toby Young, Guido Fawkes, Melanie Phillips, Damian Thompson, Daniel Hannan, Christopher Booker, Andrew Roberts, Nadine Dorries, and so on, who had been caught out indulging in some similar malpractice. Would the many liberal or atheistic writers and pundits who sought to defend (or "put into perspective") Hari have been so charitable? Of course not.
Weiye Loh

brianwhelan.net - Is Johann Hari a copy-pasting churnalist? - 0 views

brianwhelan.net/...hari-a-copy-pasting-churnalist

Plagiarism Churnalism Journalism

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • many hacks lift quotes and thats not a crime but Hari appears to be passing off copy-pasted text from Levy’s writings in Haaretz and interviews with other hacks as an exclusive interview
  • The quote is sewn together with a string of other ideas Levy may or may not have shared with Hari but at no point does Hari indicate the quotes are taken from elsewhere. While Hari has questions to answer over the quotes he claims were given directly to him he also seems to be freely creating mash-up quotes out of disparate statements levy has made over the years. Not the practice of an award winning hack.
  • Hari has issued a reply that fails to explain why quotes are passed off as having been said directly to him; When interviewing a writer for a 6000-word profile, accurately quoting their writing is not “plagiarism” or “cut & paste journalism” Perhaps he would do better to heed his own words from August 2010; You don’t have a choice about being wrong sometimes: mistakes will be your life-long companion. But you do have a choice about whether to approach your error in terror so you suppress, ignore and repeat it – or to make it your honest, open ally in trying to get to the truth.
  • Weiye Loh on 28 Jun 11
     
    Orwell Prize winning hack Johann Hari has some explaining to do. After reading a recent blog post detailing how he seems to have plagiarised large parts of his interview with Antonio Negri I thought I'd have a closer look at his work.
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