Media Nation

Fact-challenged conservative columnist (make that the fact-challenged conservative columnist) Mark Steyn has been accused of plagiarism or something like it for a takedown he wrote of Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code.”

The case against Steyn is made by Language Log‘s Mark Liberman, who says the style and content were lifted from two posts about Brown’s crimes against the English language that had been written by his co-blogger, Geoffrey Pullum, in 2004 and 2005. Liberman offers links and analysis — everything you need to come to your own conclusion.

A lot of it has to do with Pullum’s — and Steyn’s — bemusement at Brown’s leaving out the “the” in describing what people do, as in, “Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own.” This construction is so common in journalism that it may not be immediately recognizable as wrong (or at least weird), but, in fact, the sentence ought to be preceded with a “the.”

I wish the case against Steyn were clearer. The problem is that Steyn actually cites Pullum even as he apparently rips him off. This isn’t classic plagiarism; rather, it strikes me as inadequate attribution. Steyn’s not-quite-there crediting of Pullum is either clumsy or disingenuous. Take your pick.

Liberman makes some good points about the different shades of plagiarism and its ilk here; he also reports that Steyn’s assistant has threatened him with legal action. Nice! More on those threats here. It seems that Steyn’s claiming he’d never heard of Language Log until he’d been attacked.

File this under: “How Mark Steyn Got Pissed, Got Wild and Got a Lawyer.”

Boston Globe publisher Richard Gilman tells his newspaper that departing ombudsman Richard Chacón will be replaced.

To get an idea of just how short his stint was, take a look at what it says next to his farewell post: “Richard Chacón is the new Globe Ombudsman.” Yes, and the old and soon-to-be-former ombudsman, too.

Ah, Richard, we hardly knew ye. Actually, that’s not quite true. Chacón had been a Globe staffer for a dozen years, covering Latin America, among other beats, and later serving as the deputy foreign editor. But, as with his predecessor, Christine Chinlund, Chacón never seemed to get untracked as ombudsman, striking such a polite, inoffensive tone that it was hard to remember what he had written five minutes after you’d read it.

Even that may not have been good enough for the higher-ups. Last fall, he wrote what might have been his only tough piece, on the Globe’s business partnership with the Red Sox. Among other things, he criticized top Globe business-side executives for accepting World Series rings. Two weeks later, Chacón backed down.

On Saturday, Chacón hinted at how unpleasant life can be as the Globe’s in-house critic: “My year as ombudsman has been one of the most memorable in my career (note: I didn’t say ‘fun’).”

Given the Globe’s current budget woes, as well as the fact that editor Martin Baron and publisher Richard Gilman have in the past at least talked about doing away with the ombudsman’s position, it’s possible that Chacón’s departure may mark the end of an era. But assuming Baron and Gilman understand the importance of having an ongoing conversation with their readers, I’ll repeat an argument I’ve made previously: the ombudsman should be a respected outsider who serves for no more than two or three years.

That’s the way the Washington Post has always done it. That’s the way the New York Times has done it since creating the “public editor” position following the Jayson Blair/Howell Raines meltdown of several years ago. Indeed, check out Byron Calame’s piece in yesterday’s Times, on a scoop that turned out too good to be true. The estimable Jack Shafer recently whacked Calame for his “dreadful news sense.” Maybe so, but Calame’s independence and stature — he is a retired deputy managing editor of the Wall Street Journal — allow him to take on sensitive subjects without worrying about how management will react.

Even though several Globe ombudsmen have done an excellent job — including, most recently, my former Boston Phoenix colleague Mark Jurkowitz, who held the position in the mid-1990s — overall, it’s just too personally difficult to whack the people you work with, especially when you expect to return to the newsroom after your term is over.

Chacón, to his credit, did start a blog, which is an ideal way for news organizations to converse with readers. He never fully exploited it, but that’s no reason to give up on it. At a time when circulation is declining and public distrust of the media is growing, this is a moment to expand the ombudsman’s role — and to give that position the independence and voice that it needs.

Update: Chacón tells Mark that he’s going to work for Deval Patrick.

It’s been a little more than a week since USA Today reported that the nation’s three largest phone companies turned over their customers’ calling records to the National Security Agency. Two of those companies, BellSouth and Verizon, have issued denials; now BellSouth is demanding a retraction. Is USAT’s story in tatters?

The answer, I think, is no. I suspect that USAT got much of the story right, some of it wrong, and lacks the wit and the expertise to defend itself properly. (And yes, this is different from what I said yesterday.) The Washington Post’s Arshad Mohammed, in reporting on the latest from BellSouth, offers this today:

“The story came out in USA Today … and then all this dancing starting, which doesn’t give people reason to believe it wasn’t true,” said Mary J. Culnan, a professor at Bentley College and a privacy expert. “These kind of carefully worded press releases where people just don’t flat out say ‘We didn’t do it’ — I think that’s why people continue to be suspicious.”

That sounds about right.

Perhaps USAT’s best defense is that its exclusive of last Thursday wasn’t all that exclusive. On Dec. 24, the New York Times’ Eric Lichtblau and James Risen — the same reporters who had broken the warrantless-wiretapping story — weighed in with a meaty report that pretty much had everything USAT had, missing only the names of the phone companies. The headline: “Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report.” Lichtblau and Risen wrote:

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said….

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation….

Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

This so-called “pattern analysis” on calls within the United States would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.

To my knowledge, no one has demanded that this story be retracted. You may not have bothered to read the Times on Christmas Eve, but, as you can see, it was one of the pieces for which Lichtblau and Risen won a Pulitzer. So go back and read their story now.

It looks like we’ve hit a lull in the possible unraveling of the USA Today story over whether the nation’s three largest phone companies gave their customers’ calling records to the National Security Agency. Here are a few newish developments:

• The New York Times today reports that the NSA may really have been after long-distance records, not local calls, which could explain the responses put forth by the phone companies — including the denials issued earlier this week by BellSouth and Verizon. Comment: If you’re trying to figure out from this whether USAT got it right, good luck. The Times report appears to prop up the gist of the USAT story, but the details are different from what USAT reported last week.
• Yesterday, as at least one Media Nation reader has noted, the liberal site Think Progress posted an item reporting that, on May 5, President Bush signed a memorandum that “allows the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, to authorize a company to conceal activities related to national security.” The item continues: “There is no evidence that this executive order has been used by John Negroponte with respect to the telcos. Of course, if it was used, we wouldn’t know about it.” Bolstering that is a story posted on News.com by Declan McCullagh that ominously begins: “An AT&T attorney indicated in federal court on Wednesday that the Bush administration may have provided legal authorization for the telecommunications company to open its network to the National Security Agency.” Read the whole thing. Comment: How does this relate to the USA Today story? Don’t know. But clearly it’s more evidence that the White House is contemptuous of our civil liberties and the public’s right to know what its government is doing.
• Josh Marshall has posted several times on this, and has flatly stated that BellSouth and Verizon are “lying.” How does he know? “Common sense” and a “hunch.” Well, now. I like Josh’s stuff, but I think he ought to do better than that. He also points to a commentary by Vaughn Ververs, who thinks the USAT story might be “slipping away.” Marshall disagrees with Ververs. Comment: I think Ververs might be right, but I’m not ready to walk away yet. But USAT needs to undertake a serious effort to rehabilitate its story. If it can.

This afternoon I paid a visit to my friendly Verizon Wireless store, which may or may not be providing my calling information to the National Security Agency. I had come to upgrade to a Treo 650 — an expensive proposition somewhat ameliorated by the fact that I had $100 coming toward a new phone.

Obstacle #1: The saleswoman told me that I had to choose between two Internet plans. I think they were $25 a month and $45 a month. I told her I didn’t want an Internet plan — that I intended to use my Treo as a phone and organizer, not to receive e-mail or access the Web. She seemed mildly flummoxed, but I cleared the hurdle.

Obstacle #2: The sale was nearly complete when I sought assurance that we wouldn’t be paying any more per month than we are now. No, I was told — except, of course, for the $5 a month mandatory fee that comes with my having chosen “pay as you go” Internet access. I repeated that I didn’t want any Internet access. The answer: Not an option. My answer: No sale.

I am not a Luddite. In fact, I had intended at some point to check out the possibility of adding WiFi to the Treo for occasional Internet access, à la carte or free. But I wasn’t going to pay $60 a year for something I don’t want or need. Why can’t I choose the features I want? Ridiculous.

Tom Mulvoy, a retired Boston Globe managing editor, has responded to Christopher Lydon’s essay that appears in the current CommonWealth Magazine. (Here is my earlier post on Lydon’s piece.) It makes for excellent reading, especially for those of us old enough to remember Tom Winship’s Boston Globe.

And bloggers take note: CommonWealth has added a feature making it possible to generate an open link to every feature on the Web site, thus bypassing the free but occasionally frustrating registration procedure. Look for “Link to this page registration-free,” in the upper right. (Disclosure: Yes, I’m a CommonWealth contributor.)

James Wood, writing in what appears to be a freely available essay on The New Republic’s Web site, shows that he gets Stephen Colbert.

I disagree with Wood’s observation that the transcript of Colbert’s appearance at White House Correspondents Association Dinner is better than the video — I thought actually watching Colbert was what brought his words to life. But Wood is dead-on in observing that humor was just one of the things that Colbert was up to that night, and certainly not the most important thing. He writes:

Obviously enough, this is designed not to amuse, but to wound, to goad, to irritate. It is not comedy; the discourse has moved location, from the funhouse to the church, and it has become preachy and a little earnest. We are in the realm of the blogosphere. Again and again, Colbert chides the MSM in much the way that the alternative press does: “John McCain, John McCain, what a maverick! Somebody find out what fork he used on his salad, because I guarantee you, it wasn’t a salad fork. This guy could have used a spoon! There’s no predicting him.” Actually, this last jibe is pretty funny, and it neatly pops both John McCain’s ballooning self-regard and the tedious reverence of the establishment media.

And, pleasingly, the MSM have responded with delicious displays of their own inability to read.

Wood follows that up with a nice poke at Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (see this and this). Good stuff.

USA Today may have a serious problem on its hands. This hasn’t reached Jack Kelley proportions, and it may not. But a week after the paper broke a story alleging that the nation’s three largest telephone companies were handing over their customers’ calling lists to the National Security Agency, the paper’s editors must find themselves desperately hoping that it doesn’t all fall apart.

We now know that two of the three phone companies — BellSouth and Verizon — have issued firm, unambiguous denials. Here’s the item I posted on BellSouth yesterday, with relevant links. The Verizon denial is reported today by the Washington Post here and the New York Times here. Both papers claim that USA Today might have gotten it right with respect to Verizon if it turns out that a recently acquired subsdiary, MCI, had been cooperating with the NSA. Well, yes. But clearly the burden of proof has shifted from the defendant to the plaintiff: USA Today has to offer some evidence that its story is true. Now.

USA Today’s account today offers this:

Long-distance calls placed by BellSouth and Verizon subscribers can traverse the networks of other carriers who collect a variety of information for billing purposes. Verizon’s statement leaves open the possibility that the NSA directed its requests to long-distance companies, or that call data was collected by means other than Verizon handing them over, the Associated Press reported Tuesday.

That strikes me as a pretty thin reed on which to be hanging such an important story. Moreover, USA Today has clearly lost control, given that it’s pointing to the speculative musings (“leaves open the possibility,” indeed) of another news organization in order to keep its exclusive alive. (I was not able to locate the AP story in my rather cursory search, and am relying on USA Today’s description. Perhaps not a smart move on my part.)

Take a look at the Verizon statement USA Today included in its original story last Thursday: “We do not comment on national security matters, we act in full compliance with the law and we are committed to safeguarding our customers’ privacy.” Not exactly confirmation, is it?

And in a preview of coming attractions, here’s what AT&T said in that same story: “We do not comment on matters of national security, except to say that we only assist law enforcement and government agencies charged with protecting national security in strict accordance with the law.” It wouldn’t exactly be a surprise if AT&T issues a denial later today.

We are dealing with some incredibly sensitive material, and it’s hard to know exactly what to think. Given the stakes, it’s possible that USA Today got the story more or less right, and that BellSouth and Verizon have issued denials on hypertechnical grounds that we’re not in a position to evaluate.

But given that the original story was based on unnamed sources who may or may not know what they’re talking about, and given that the paper grasps at that straw from the AP today, it doesn’t look good.

Update: I just found this on Romenesko. Think Harry Jaffe might like to have it back?

Someone who is or claims to be the wife of the guy who registered the domain name christymihos.net posts a long, long note to Universal Hub. Here’s my earlier item, which has all the relevant links. Commenters seem unimpressed, given that the Christy Mihos campaign has been accused of threatening Hub Politics, the blog where this all started.

With Media Nation’s unerring sense of finding the most trivial aspect of a trivial item, I am pleased to report that this defender of Mihos’ honor confirms my earlier hunch that christymihos.net did not mirror the official christy2006.com site but, rather, merely forwarded people to it.