Paranoia begets plagiarism
Dear Johnny,
Re: Graham Finch's letter (Johnny Neihu's Mailbag, Jan. 6, page 8). Could you be getting a tad paranoid? Understandably, of course, since Taiwan has real enemies out to get it. Seems to me that the author of the article in the Independent just got his geography wrong, and the island neighbor across the Strait with the excellent high-speed railway he had in mind is Japan (oops, wrong body of water).
The New York Times article on the high speed rail was also pretty objectionable. It spent most of its coverage focusing on complaints about the line, and relatively little on the advantages. Perhaps a future Johnny column could ask readers to find a story in which a foreign newspaper finds something to praise about Taiwan? Just a thought.
June Teufel Dreyer
Department of Political Science
University of Miami
Johnny replies: You might be right about the paranoia, June, but there's more to this than even my free-associating, conspiracy theory-addled brain could have imagined.
As it happens, just after my column was published last week, I discovered unfortunate similarities between the Independent article ("Japan's bullet train reaches Taiwan at a cost of ?7.7bn," Jan. 5) and the New York Times piece ("Taiwan's bullet trains can't outrun controversy," Jan. 4).
Consider these excerpts, for example (I haven't got the space to list every suspect passage because there are a lot of them):
The New York Times (dateline: Taipei, Dec. 28): "The system has become so complex that the leader of Taiwan's consumer movement is calling for citizens to boycott it entirely until extensive safety data is released.
`Cherish your life, don't be a guinea pig,' Cheng Jen-hung, the chairman of the Consumers' Foundation, said in an interview [ie, with the New York Times], repeating his group's slogan. With 900 passengers on a fully loaded train, he warned, `if there is an accident, there will be very heavy casualties.'
Arthur Chiang, the vice president for administration at Taiwan High Speed Rail, said the system was completely safe. But he acknowledged that the project had been bedeviled by opposition."
Now let's look at the Independent (no dateline): "The organisation has become so complex that the leader of Taiwan's consumer movement is urging a boycott until safety data is released.
`Cherish your life, don't be a guinea pig,' says Cheng Jen-hung, chairman of the Consumers' Foundation. With 900 passengers on a fully-loaded train casualties could be `very heavy' he believes.
Arthur Chiang, a vice-president of Taiwain [sic] High Speed Rail, acknowledged that the project had been bedevilled by opposition, but insisted that it was completely safe."
Golly.
And there I was praising the Independent article, when in fact the good stuff was all written by the New York Times' Keith Bradsher and then tweaked a little. The only bit of substance that the reporter wrote was the lead that included two howlers!
I e-mailed the foreign desk and then the news desk of the Independent about the report by Barrie Clement -- the paper's transport editor -- and received no reply, even after suggesting that there was inappropriate use of another newspaper's property. Make of that what you will.
Either way, it seems a little disrespectful toward readers to plagiarize a New York Times article and write in mistakes misidentifying Taiwan and Japan.
If this kind of reporting continues at the Independent, perhaps they'll need to redub themselves the Dependent.
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