One of Canada’s largest newspapers is changing the way its public oversight editor operates after plagiarism allegations leveled against a high-profile columnist grew into a firestorm of outrage this week.
The Globe and Mail Editor-in-Chief John Stackhouse has announced that the position of public editor will now report directly to the newspaper’s publisher in an effort to make the position fully autonomous from the newsroom.
The change comes after a blogger raised questions last week about a three-year-old article written by columnist Margaret Wente.
Carol Wainio, a professor at the University of Ottawa who runs the blog Media Culpa, suggested the wording in Wente’s 2009 column on genetically modified food in Africa was similar to a column previously published in another newspaper.
Stackhouse said in a memo posted online on Monday evening that “appropriate action” had been taken against Wente, although details would not be released publicly.
Stackhouse further said the “journalism in this instance did not meet the standards of The Globe and Mail in terms of sourcing, use of quotation marks and reasonable credit for the work of others.”
Wente addressed the criticism in an article published Tuesday, apologizing for using another columnist’s words and saying she took notes from his article that carelessly ended up being used in her column.
Wente went on to say she was not a serial plagiarist and that the mistake was not an attempt to deceive her readers.
“I haven’t always lived up to my own standards. I’m sorry for my journalistic lapses, and I think that, when I deserve the heat, I should take it and accept the consequences,” Wente wrote.
“But I’m also sorry we live in an age where attacks on people’s character and reputation seem to have become the norm. Most of all, I regret the trouble I’ve created for my Globe colleagues by giving any opening at all to my many critics. In an ideal world, there wouldn’t be any openings. In the real world, there are.”
The change to the public editor position appears to come in response to the handling of the Wente controversy.
Public Editor Sylvia Stead addressed the plagiarism allegations last week, stating that some of Wente’s work fell short of the paper’s code of conduct.
“I investigated the matter, spoke with the columnist, Margaret Wente, and her editor, endeavoured to find all of the original documents and read all but one. (I’ve ordered the last one.) In the end, there appears to be some truth to the concerns but not on every count,” Stead wrote last week.
Stead did not say whether Wente had been disciplined in any way, and her response appeared to fall short in the eyes of many industry analysts.
On Tuesday, Stead wrote a new article admitting that she “erred” in how she handled the complaint, adding she needed to better educate staff on the Globe’s rules of journalism.
“I erred in not being more forthright in saying that the work in this complaint was unacceptable and failed to meet Globe and Mail standards. It was not acceptable,” she wrote in a blog post. “In my haste to respond, my earlier blog post was not well considered. I didn’t have all the information I required to make a proper assessment last week and should have taken more time and probed more.”
John Miller, the former Ryerson University journalism chair, suggested Stead’s investigation appeared to be “perfunctory” and resulted in finding the mistake to be a minor misdemeanour.
“This is a shockingly inadequate response, one that I believe has irreparably compromised the integrity of the Globe and Mail's new public editor, and also tarnished the reputation of the newspaper itself,” Miller wrote in a post on his blog The Journalism Doctor.
Belinda Alzner associate editor of J-Source, told CTV News Channel on Monday that Wainio had pointed out issues in the past, but had never received this level of publicity before.
“She sort of put it out there to see what other people thought. She’s been writing about this for a while, but for whatever reason this particular blog post kind of took off a bit and gained a lot of momentum on social media,” she said.
Sabrina Maddeaux, managing editor of Toronto Standard, agreed social media played a role in exposing the issue. She added that the Wente controversy should be considered a turning point for print journalism.
“I think the media has to look at themselves, and media owners, and decide for ourselves what we want to be going forward,” Maddeaux told CTV News Channel. “I think right now traditional media is scrambling for every reader it can get. We need to be accountable and we need to keep our integrity up.”
