“‘Plagiarist-gate’ revisited” is a story about a weekly newspaper stuck in a hole. One which it is determinedly digging for itself. In the item, posted to the “it’s not a blog!” published by Willamette Weak, web editor and copy chief Ian Gillingham serves up another helping of evidence that the paper’s staff is devoid of any sense of professional ethics.
In his post, Gillingham bleats that the paper simply was “thinking we’d play the Mercury’s alt-baiting game for once”, and that Waterhouse merely “wanted to give Alison and the Merc a little jab”.
The problem here, of course, is that when the Mercury weirdly beats the drums of a newspaper war, it never extends to the outer rim of falsely accusing its competitor of plagiarism.
“The Mercury,” opines Gillingham, “expertly spun Ben’s teasing post into a plagiarism charge, though he’d carefully avoided the term.”
This is a line that’s already been debunked, by me and others, over on the Mercury’s Blogtown. When a writer like Waterhouse pens phrases such as “Notice any similarities? Like maybe the whole thing?” and “…considering the hot water former Merc managing ed Phil Busse got himself into in 2001…” (a reference to an earlier plagiarism dust-up), Waterhouse knows full well that what he’s doing is making a charge of plagiarism while avoiding the use of the term.
That’s not “teasing”. And that’s not “alt-baiting”. That’s an allegation of plagiarism. And, as I’ve said elsewhere, if Willamette Weak is sticking by it, and claiming it isn’t one, then the paper is dead as an operation to be taken seriously.
Gillingham’s own spin of the situation suggests that he (and his fellow editors) would be better off serving politicians in City Hall than in publishing a newspaper.
The bulk of the rest of Gillingham’s post is an attempt, once again, to paint similar opinions of the same play as evidence of plagiarism by some other name. The most blatant bit of bullshit is the point about the play’s events and their role as possibly the first “media circus”. Gillingham adroitly manages to avoid any mention of last Friday’s Tribune mini-review of the same play, whose headline includes that phrase, and whose copy refers to the events as “the center of the country’s first true media spectacle”.
More than anything else, that gives credence to the theory, presented by more than one commenter over at Blogtown, that this particular aspect of the historical events likely were mentioned in Stumptown Stages’ press release (or other promotional materials) about the play, and that all three critics simply ran with that.
If that’s the case, then either Gillingham has not bothered actually to research any of this (which would make him a very bad editor), or he knows its the case and is ignoring it in the name of continuing to falsely trash the reputation of a competing reporter.
Not one word of what Willamette Weak’s staff has said on this matter does anything other than prove that they are completely devoid of even the most basic journalistic ethics. Weird little newspaper wars are one thing. But journalists are not supposed to eat their own merely and only because they have the taste for blood.
Addendum: The comments over at WWire now prove conclusively that the press release for the play contained many of the things that have ended up in all three of the reviews mentioned here. Yet more proof of the irresponsible shakiness of everything Willamette Weak’s staff has said on this matter.
