The Globe and Mail falls off its “pedastal”

A story by Oliver Moore on page R14 of Saturday’s print edition of The Globe and Mail carries the headline “Off the bike, and the pedastal”.  Can’t find it with that headline anywhere online. 

To be fair, though, it was pointed out to me that the teensy, tiny cottage industry that is this blog used the (legitimate) variant “miniscule” rather than the more appropriate “minuscule” in a previous post.

“Pedastal” though, seems to be just a goof.

Margaret Wente’s “Big Wind”: another error?

In her latest column against sustainable energy, Margaret Wente writes that, “Big Wind is among the biggest lobbyists in Washington”. 

She provides nothing to support a claim that appears to be false.  Here’s a list of the 20 biggest lobbyists in Washington from the Center for Responsive Politics.  Topping it is the US Chamber of Commerce which spent $136 million on lobbying in 2012, followed by a variety of sectors like Real Estate, Pharmaceuticals, Blue Cross, Oil, and Communications.  “Big Wind” is nowhere “among the biggest lobbyists in Washington”.

The same body notes that, “Until 2008, AWEA (American Wind Energy Association) failed to crack the $1 million mark in annual lobbying expenditures -- and most years, it spent less than $500,000.”  

According to Business Pundit, which lists “10 of the biggest lobbies” in Washington, Tech (at “$120 million” - Google alone doled out $20 million for lobbying in 2012), Big Oil (“$150 million”), Agribusiness (“$150 million”), Financial (“hundreds of millions”), Big Pharma, Defense, Mining, and AARP all dwarf the pitiful lobbying dollars of wind power.  Even the NRA and the Pro Israel lobbies are larger.

In 2009, lobbying by the American Wind Energy Association did increase dramatically to $5 million and then dropped back down to about $2 million in recent years.  A report from January 2013 in the Washington Free Beacon confirms this, noting that,  “The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) spent more than $2.1 million in 2012, a 61 percent increase from the $1.5 million it spent the previous year.”

It’s not clear what Ms. Wente means by “Big Wind”. Aside from the industry organization, many individual wind energy companies’ lobbying expenses were so miniscule they fell below the threshold for reporting, but if she is referring to Nextera (which she mentions in her article), her claim is also incorrect. 

Nextera, formerly Florida Power and Light and now one of the largest providers of wind energy, spent about $5 million in lobbying last year.  But as wind makes up about half of the company’s power portfolio (the rest includes gas, nuclear, hydro, solar and others), it would be equally erroneous for Ms. Wente to claim that this company isthe “Big Wind” lobby.  Half of $5 million is about equivalent to the amount spent by the American Wind Energy Association and is still dwarfed by any one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of lobbyists in Washington who spend many, many times that amount.

Perhaps Ms. Wente meant to say that “Big Wind” or Nextera was one of the biggest electric utility lobbyists in Washington.  But this wouldn’t be true either.  It’s lobbying constituted only about one third of the nearly $16 million spent by the largest electric utilities last year, and if one subtracts the non-wind percentage of its holdings, it drops out of the top ten utility lobbyists altogether. 

By any measure, $2 million represents a tiny fraction of what the “biggest lobbyists in Washington” spent last year.  So unless Ms. Wente can provide sources and facts to support her claim, it should be corrected.  

As for her claim that Nextera paid no income tax, Ms. Wente omits to mention that there are dozensof other companies, like Verizon and Boeing, who, due to U.S. tax structure, are in a similar position.

In addition to a significant number of pastplagiarismand attributionproblems, Margaret Wente has engaged in previous misrepresentations of environmental issues, from nearly doubling the number of polar bears in Canada (to support her claim that they’re not at risk), to her claims about electric cars.  One might also ask whether, when writing about energy issues, it might be appropriate to disclose her longstanding position on the board of Energy Probe.

According to its wikipedia page, “Energy Probe is a non-governmental environmental policy organization based in Toronto and best known for its role in opposing nuclear power,[1][2][3] and as a free-market lobbyist for fossil fuels[4] and well-known Canadian proponent of climate change denial.”

Margaret Wente, Attribution, and Foreign Policy

Unfortunately, Margaret Wente’s problemswith attribution are significant, and her relative lack of depth in regard to foreign policy was discussed here.

Today she writes:  “it was hard to find anyone who thinks the United States should lead from behind, as Barack Obama says he wants to do”.

While some of the President's opponents have used the term "lead from behind", neither Obama, nor any of his officials “ever uttered the phrase”,  according to the Concord Monitor and other sources:

"The ‘lead from behind’ quote that Republicans claim represents Obama's foreign policy strategy was never uttered by him. It appeared in an article by New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza who attributed the statement to a White House official who remains anonymous".

The phrase has been “repeated so many times it becomes an accepted fact -- even when it's not.”  USA Today reports:

It comes from” a New Yorker piece in May on how the Arab Spring -- and the NATO military action in Libya -- affected Obama's approach to foreign policy, and reads: “One of his advisers described the President's actions in Libya as ‘leading from behind.’…”

…Even if the anonymous adviser still works in the White House, administration officials by no means embraced the phrase and have questioned whether it came from one of their own or an outside adviser. No Obama official has ever uttered the phrase in public on the record.”

Most opponents of the president are careful enough to use the phrase in such a way as to avoid attributing the words directly to Obama, as Wente has unfortunately done. 

Correction Update:  The following little note, now appended to the online version of the column, is how The Globe addressed the problem identified above:

“An earlier online version of this column contained unclear attribution. This version has been clarified”.

How did they clarify?  The sentence which read “…it was hard to find anyone who thinks the United States should lead from behind, as Barack Obama says he wants to do”, now reads: 

“…it was hard to find anyone who thinks the United States should lead from behind, as Barack Obama wants to do”.   

Classy.  

Wente and attribution errors.  Fish in a barrel.

Margaret Wente and The Gelber Prize

Plagiarism, 'originality failure', phantom Occupy protester – however you look at it, it’s surprising that columnist Margaret Wente was named to the jury for the Gelber Prize.  Aside from the incident that became an international story  (and resulted in her being 'disciplined'by The Globe and Mail), there are so many other reasons to wonder about the choice. 

Don’t universities take strong public standards against plagiarism?  What would the University of Toronto or The Munk School (partners in the award) do with students who engaged in these practices?

It’s not as though Ms. Wente springs immediately to mind as the country’s foremost expert in diplomacy and foreign policy – the focus of the award; she’s best known for a kind of artful contrarianism often aimed at social issues like gender and education.  Unlike journalists who also produce sustained scholarship on foreign affairs, her books are largely collections of previous columns – an anecdotal writing style with coversshowing her provocatively draped in a Canadian flag.  They seem more about Wente than the world.

Given its billing as “the world's most importantaward for non-fiction”, you’d expect jurors to bring relevant expertise from a variety of perspectives.  But looking at the list, there’s not a lot of diversity.  Other jurors include former Globe Editor William Thorsell, who, as I think I read somewhere, shares both a work history and a country house postal code with Ms. Wente.  And Wente’s ‘originality’ problems may present other challenges in terms of range and diversity – take for example fellow juror, Walter Russell Mead.

In the last couple of years, Wente has cited the work of the “brilliant analyst Walter Russell Mead” about 7 times.  While not extensive enough to warrant the plagiarism discussionthat followed the Paarlberg or Carr examples, or the ethical concerns about "John", one might still ask if some of the similarities in viewpoint or missing quotation marks in these articles amplify questions around her selection.

For example, a column Ms. Wente wrote on climate change followed one by Mead, who here puts punctuation around material he includes from The Guardian: 

“[a] Guardian investigation… found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.”

But as happens so often, Wente presents almost identical material with no quotation marks.

The Guardian… has found that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed, and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

In a similar article called Kyoto fraud revealed, Mead celebrated the demise of that “idiotic”, “stupid piece of counterproductive social engineering” (or as others might see it – failed international diplomacy) aimed at reducing greenhouse gases.   He argued that environmentalists got a ‘free ride from the media’ and ‘need to grow up’.  Wente seems to be singing along for a bit.

Mead:

If you add up the CO2 released by the goods and services Europeans consumed, as opposed to the CO2 thrown off by the goods and services they produced, the EU was responsible for 40% more CO2 in 2010 than in 1990.

Wente:

(The EU is actually responsible for 40 per cent more CO2 today than it was in 1990, if you count the goods and services it consumed as opposed to the ones that it produced.)

Mead:

(Environmentalism) gets a free ride from most of the mainstream media and also the mainstream intellectual establishment. 

Wente: 

They got a fabulous free ride from politicians and the media…

Mead:

Kyoto was as big a fraud as…

Wente: 

…reduction in carbon emissions… exposed as a giant fraud…

Mead:

Environmentalists will only be able to help the world when they grow up. 

And, after arguing that environmentalists should forget climate change and polar bears and focus on important things - like lions and tigers - she echoes Mead’s observation: 

Wente:

Please grow up, people. You have important work to do.

In other articles, both writers show their displeasure with public education and universities, arguing that we need to scrap current arrangements, and move to a more market driven approach.

Mead:

Tenure is going to become much, much rarer…

Wente:

Tenure will become much rarer…

Mead says classes will be taught by:

 

… non-Ph.D. TA’s trained to handle a particular group of courses…

Wente:

…teaching loads will increasingly be handled by non-PhDs trained to handle a particular group of courses.

Mead: 

The natural sciences … will probably do better than the humanities…

Wente:

Natural sciences will fare better than the humanities…

Here, Wente gets around to mentioning Mead, but still no quotation marks:

…as U.S. commentator Walter Russell Mead remarks, taxpayers are not going to subsidize research in critical literary theory much longer.

Mead:

Taxpayers are not going to subsidize research in critical literary theory very much longer. 

In Our school systems are so last century Wente credits Mead for paraphrased material, but then uses some words that had appeared in an article by Globe colleague Gary Mason (without mentioning him):

Wente, March 2012:

“It is in almost every respect a system built for another age,” writes education historian John Fleming (whose views were cited in The Province newspaper). The union, the government and the school trustees, in his view, are all anti-visionary, anti-technological and completely committed to the status quo.

The historian’s name was later corrected; and Thomas Fleming’s views - at least the ones that Mason and Wente cite – seem to have appeared in The Tyee rather than The Province. Here’s Mason’s passage in The Globe a few months earlier.

Gary Mason, October, 2011:

“It is in almost every respect a system built for another age,” Dr. Fleming writes… the union, the government and the school trustees – are anti-visionary, anti-technological and completely committed to the status quo.

Wente then devotes a few paragraphs to Mead’s 21^stcentury vision of education:

…groups of like-minded teachers… empowered to get together and open neighbourhood schools and run them as they see fit… determine their own curriculum, teaching materials and policies. They…would decide how big the classes would be and whether they should offer Grade 11 history, gym, music or clown lessons. Teachers would be treated as entrepreneurs and professionals… Principals would be able to recruit the teachers they want...Every so often, the students would write standard tests in core subjects, and the results would be public…

And last, in Debt ceiling chicken and the end of empire, Wente again channels Mead, who in the article she cites also writes that Medicare/Medicaid is a “catastrophe” “destroying the nation”, adding that abortion rates in the U.S. contribute to a “holocaust of youth and hope on a scale hard to match”. Wente apparently concurs:

As the thinker Walter Russell Mead puts it, the U.S. health system marries the greed of the private sector to the ineptitude of government. This health-care industrial complex will soon account for one-fifth of the economy.

No real attribution problems there, but in the same article, Ms. Wente finds efficiencies in material she reuses two weeks later.

Wente, July 30, 2011: As Fortune’s Nina Easton writes, 20 per cent of all American men are “collecting unemployment, in prison, on disability, operating in the underground economy, or getting by on the paycheques of wives or girlfriends or parents.”

Wente, August 16, 2011: These men, as Fortune’s Nina Easton observes, are either “collecting unemployment, in prison, on disability, operating in the underground economy, or getting by on the paycheques of wives or girlfriends or parents.”

Are these as serious as past instances?  No.  But they do reflect a kind of practice, a habit, and dare one say, a kind of entitlement.  Given all that, and what was pretty universally described as the dreadful way Ms. Wente and her editors dealt with the more serious instances, one has to wonder why the Gelber Prize, the University of Toronto and the Munk School chose to rely so heavily on jurors associated with that particular newspaper in their selection of assessors .

One can think of so many qualified Canadian writers with unblemished careers.  Even if one had to put so many eggs in The Globe’s basket, there are other choices.  Take Stephanie Nolen – a book, sixNational Newspaper Awards, a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics. Or Doug Saunders, author of two books at least related to foreign policy. 

There are lots of writers capable of sustained, original writing on relevant issues who would know first hand what the task involves – historians, analysts and others who could provide peer review, not just book review – especially when some of those book reviews have been acknowledged to be unacceptable. 

And there are other newspapers, other postal codes.  How about Dan Gardner?  True, he may not have written glowing profiles of Peter Munk, but he’s written two great books and a pretty good article about Robert Paarlberg.

Sure, the Gelber Prize involves a private foundation, a wonderful and generous gift, and they can do what they want with their money. But it’s also associated with, and reflects, The University of Toronto and The Munk School – which, coincidentally, just announced a new journalism partnership with The Globe and Mail. What might that mean?  As Ms. Wente might say, I don’t have a clue.