Hmmmm?

Quotation marks do funny things with the text formatting on this page.

And more hmmmm?

Forget it just the text in the subject line seems different.

Only little people

Plagiarise . Or is it " when the president does it isn't"? Or perhaps more " let them eat copyright"?

Hakuin

Ahhh, but little people also get hung up technicalities and ignore any message that there might be.

Wente & Ayn Rand - birds of a feather?

The hypocrisy that Wente demonstrated over her plagiarizing ways reminds me of that even more famous libertarian, Ayn Rand.

You know who I mean - the one who lambasted anyone who accepted financial help from the government as she herself collected welfare cheques and had free medicare in the US to treat her illnesses. This is hypocrisy in the extreme!

Rand is the darling of the Tea Party. Wente is doing her best to win similar status among Canada's own Tea Party, the group who used to be called the Reform Party.

Heh heh!

Raising Wente to the depths of Rand is too charitable.

..Everybodys' Doing It

The 'venerable' Toronto Star went after Wente.

http://www.thestar.com/topic/margaretwente

Now this:

Toronto school board director admits plagiarism in Star article.

January 09, 2013

"Chris Spence, director of education for Toronto’s public school board, has admitted to and apologized for plagiarizing several passages in an article he wrote for the Star about the importance of extracurricular activities.

He ended the statement saying: “I apologize, unreservedly and categorically, to the Toronto Star and its editorial staff for the embarrassment I have caused them. I apologize with equal seriousness to all of the readers of that newspaper. I apologize, in particular, to my colleagues at TDSB, and to all those families and children we are privileged to serve. I have let them all down.

Spence is a well-known educator who has been at the head of Canada’s largest school board since 2009. In 2012 he earned close to $272,000.

Last Saturday, the Star published an apology for unattributed passages in a business story that had been taken from an online Globe and Mail article."

Blaise

I bet he doesn't write for the Star again. Whereas Wente still writes for the Globe.

...Perhaps...

The Star doesn't believe in rehabilitation?

sometimes

a phrase or sentence echoes in the wellspring, something read and enjoyed never fades and at some point, without realizing what's happening, bang, the writer has used that lovely descriptive collection of words, not realizing they aren't her own...which isn't what happened with Ms. Wente... but it has happened to me...fortunately, I caught it at the personal editing stage...realized that I'd inadvertantly swiped something... knew it because I recognized I was never THAT good a writer!!

Rehabilitation?

Soft on crime eh?! Typical!

The Plus and Minus of the Internet

As a university professor, I am all-too-aware of how the internet has stimulated plagiarism among students over the past 15 years. But it has also spawned an excellent community of watchdogs, which Carol Wainio exemplifies. It has also provided tools, such as Google features and Turnitin.com, which help to monitor the quality of content.

An interesting question is whether all bloggers live up to the standards that we expect of a professional journalist such as Wente, and that we expect of university professors and students! the answer is no, they don't , because they are just bloggers and they are just blabbing in their spare time like I am right now! They should, but they often feel that they don't have to. But that failure is no excuse for Wente--a regular professional columnist with our national newspaper--to do the same.

I wrote on this subject at greater length last September at http://markcrawford.blogspot.ca/2012/09/the-real-problem-with-margaret-wente.html

Blaise

Not a question of rehabilitation, its a question of credibility. He and Wente lost theirs. Readers of Wente's columns don't seem to care about whether she's credible but I doubt they'll ever be quoting her as a source on anything.

Who cares?

It's the argument the writer is making that is key - not the method chosen to deliver it. No one reads an opinion column for facts anyway...you read it for reasoning.

Paul Orlowski is a sanctimonious and disingenuous little twerp to attack someone who has always taken direct, honest and oftentimes unpopular positions - no matter her peccadilloes.

Kredit

"to attack someone who has always taken direct, honest and oftentimes unpopular positions"

She's not honest. And her columns were very popular with the sort that likes the Globe and Reader's Digest etc.

But if you want to take the word of someone who claimed she went downtown and talked to a person at Toronto Occupy when in fact she never did, well, suit yourself. But no one will take you seriously. She's become kryponite to right-wingers. Quote her and you lose the argument.

...Frank

"Not a question of rehabilitation, its a question of credibility."

Your high moral standards and strict and severe punishment ideals are interesting. Do you hold politicians like Adrian Dix of the NDP, that while in power, write themselves memos regarding a dossier, then backdate and file them, to such high standards?

Really, Kreditanstalt??

You are supporting Wente even though she attacked university students for plagiarizing from a public podium in which she herself often plagiarizes?

You are attacking Orlowski because he sent Wente a "cheeky" e-mail emanating from his students' curiosity that pointed out her hypocrisy?

There is only one possible explanation for this strange position of yours: YOU must be related to Ms. Wente. Is your name Kreditanstalt Wente??

OR

Perhaps you have dreams of one day being married to the future Margaret Kreditanstalt?

No other explanation for your ridiculous defence of Wente's plagiarism makes sense.

What's to rehabilitate?

Wente's columns have always been worthless pieces of doggerel - the fact that she's an admitted plagiarist and that she discounts the inherent danger of running a red light is simply laughable.

Car crashes from red light runners are more likely than any other type of crash (47 percent versus 33 percent) to produce some degree of injury.

Red Light Running: More than 900 people a year die and nearly 2,000 are injured as a result of vehicles running red lights. About half of those deaths are pedestrians and occupants of other vehicles who are hit by red light runners.

Source:http://www.nhtsa.gov/
The fact is, everyone who reads Wente is polluting their mind.

Blaise

I assume you don't support any political party? Because if you're a BC Liberal supporter you got about a thousand things to account for before you start worrying about Dix. Start with how a public railroad ended up belonging to Campbell's campaign manager, and how the people Campbell hired to stack radio call-in shows for the Libs ended up getting paid 6 million and going free so they wouldn't tell what they knew in open court.

As for Wente, let's test the theory, feel free to quote her in support of an argument. No one will take it seriously. She made things up out of whole cloth and copied statements from bloggers that had nothing to do with her subject, made them part of her column and claimed she'd talked to them in person.

What would she have to do to lose credibility in your mind? Claim she talked to 3 aliens from a planet far far away?

Plagiarism

Wente is indeed a minor transgressor, but it illustrates the bind that many students find themselves in. Information is easier to share than ever before, and we encourage collaboration as a positive method, and yet the concept of plagiarism has not been updated since the Middle Ages, when scholarship was rare and had to be protected. See my post 'If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery...' on the blog 'The Provocative Pedagogue' http://www.provocative-pedagogue.com/?p=29

Wente's presence does the Globe and Mail a disservice.

She is a lazy thinker as well as a writer, given to echoing conventional inanities rather than attempting to uncover some information or patterns of behaviour that are really worth scrutinizing, something that might actually be worth the time and effort for Canadians to read. Her dull, stupefying blather is part of the reason why the G&M is sinking, no matter how much they try to anchor their canoe to the one modeled by the New York Times.

What's not to like?

Wente's serial plagiarism is no more inappropriate than Rob Ford's gladiatorial style of full-contact governance. The Centre of the Universe has been wading in thick, stinky mud for some years now. Why is it only in the last couple of years that they've started to notice for themselves?

I don't read the G&M often, but when I do, you can be certain I have no idea what Wente was blathering about.

_____Thanks, David Beers

Thanks for keeping this lady and her employers on the hotseat, David Beers. Wente is a poor model for those who aspire to be journalists. Her employer needs to rethink its schema.

Professor Orlowski's "critical thinking" response had me howling with laughter.

and G West's stats related to his comment had me howling with disgust:

"Wente's columns have always been worthless pieces of doggerel - the fact that she's an admitted plagiarist and that she discounts the inherent danger of running a red light is simply laughable."

G West's critical thinking skills are hard to beat, and I am glad he did some for Wente [though I would replace the word "laughable" with "ridiculous"]. Having spent time working as a member of the BC Ambulance Service, I have first responder knowledge of needless trauma caused by red light runners.

I'll avoid reading Wente in the future; and I'll not purchase another G&M until she's gone.

...I Wonder?

So many commentators that cannot tolerate plagiarism. Quite. I'm sure you all know that the Toronto school board director that ran partially plagiarized articles in the Toronto Star has now resigned.

How do you feel about forgery by public officials? Unacceptable under any circumstances or sometimes necessary?

Blaise

Are you saying he shouldn't have resigned from the school board?

And since you're worried, tell us what you think the penalty should be for making up sources and plagiarizing.

Quality journalism--Globe or Post?

Like G. West, I got the uncomfortable feeling that Wente was downplaying the significance of running red lights. I also liked Mark Crawford's blog on the subject ( http://markcrawford.blogspot.ca/2012/09/the-real-problem-with-margaret-wente.html ) and I totally agree: why doesn't she just migrate over to the National Post like Rex Murphy, since that appears to be where she belongs?

Although I still prefer the quality and editorial balance of the Globe over that of the Post, it troubles me that there aren't more reinforcements for Jeffrey Simpson , in terms of quality balanced journalism.