Regret the Error

Plagiarism and fabrication at the News Leader

Blair J. Parker, a sports reporter at the News Leader in Staunton, Virginia, was fired on Tuesday after an internal investigation revealed she "fabricated at least four stories and plagiarized from other stories on the Internet."
Parker was suspended last week after a story she wrote was revealed to have been made up of parts plagiarized from at least five different sources. One top of that, "Only one source was clearly real and correctly identified, and he disputes the quote attributed to him."
This could be a record for the number of plagiarized sources contained in one article. A column from the paper's executive editor describes how that then led to a larger investigation:

Following that first revelation, we began to dig deeper into Parker’s work. On Friday, Oct. 19, we realized that a community profile she had written — and which had been prepared for Friday publication before Thursday’s revelations — also was suspect. The story profiled Andrew Koch and identified him as a University of Virginia student and a Cavaliers fan. A photo was included. At 8:52 a.m. someone who identified himself as Andrew Koch came onto our newspaper forums and said that while his name and photo were used on the profile, he was not a University of Virginia student, a Cavalier’s fan and he had not vacationed in Cancun. He said that despite the use of his name and image, he was not the subject of the article. He said the photo was identical to one on a website at James Madison University, where he works. We could not locate a student Andrew Koch at U.Va. and on Saturday (Oct. 20) ran a correction stating that the profile was false.

The editor then details four more incidents of plagiarism and/or fabrication. Parker has owned up to her transgressions. "When asked about the problems in the deer-hunting story on Thursday, Parker told Publisher Roger Watson and me that she took full responsibility for her actions," writes David Frtiz. "On Tuesday, she admitted the other fabrications and offered no explanation."
He concludes with an apology:

So I apologize to you for the actions of our reporter. Our goal from the first sign of wrongdoing was to quickly and transparently understand the scope of the problem and to take firm action. It’s our responsibility to our readers. I also apologize that we didn’t figure it out sooner.

Here are two corrections published by the paper before it fired Parker:

The reporting for a local profile on Page A4 Friday cannot be verified. The photo that ran with it is of an Andrew Koch, but that Andrew Koch was not interviewed for the piece. Because of this, we retract the entire profile. The work of Blair J. Parker, the reporter who prepared the profile, is under review by The News Leader. That section of A4 was prepared early on Thursday, before questions were raised about her other work. More information will be released once the investigation is complete. Link

A Thursday B1 story about the fall deer and trout seasons by Blair J. Parker was plagiarized from several sources.
We have confirmed that large portions of the story came from other sources and that facts within the story were incorrect, thus we retract the article in its entirety.
We are beginning a thorough investigation of Parker's work since she joined the newspaper in 2006.
Plagiarism and knowingly publishing inaccurate information violates The News Leader's Principles of Ethical Conduct, a commitment to you that we take very seriously. We will report our findings once the investigation is complete
— David Fritz, executive editor Link

ABC News investigation clears Aexis Debat of fabrication, cites "four details... that we couldn't confirm"

Background here and here.
TVNewser acquired the memo that ABC News head David Westin sent to staff about the findings of the internal investigation into the work of Alexis Debat, a former consultant with the network. Some relevant excerpts:

...This review was extremely sensitive, as it required going back to confidential sources in this country and abroad. It also involved traveling to Pakistan to confirm first-hand the circumstances of Mr. Debat's work there.
Early in our review, we learned that there were other interviews Mr. Debat had published in France that the subjects denied had been conducted. We reported this story immediately on ABC News.com.
We have now completed our review. After going through all of the stories Mr. Debat worked on for ABC News, we found no instances of false reporting. Mr. Debat was not the sole source for anything ABC News reported. Moreover, we confirmed with Mr. Debat's confidential sources that they had given him the information as he'd claimed in contributing to our reports. We also confirmed that Mr. Debat traveled to the locations in Pakistan as he had claimed and talked with the sources he had identified.
Our review did uncover four details of Mr. Debat's reporting that we couldn't confirm. In one case, he mis-identified which branch of U.S. Special forces had engaged in a particular operation, although we did confirm the other facts surrounding the operation. We also found disagreements over the location for two meetings reported on by Mr. Debat, although, again, we could confirm the other facts surrounding the meetings. And, one of the people whom Mr. Debat identified as attending a meeting would neither confirm nor deny that he/she was a direct participant. None of these discrepancies would rise to the level of a formal, on-air retraction because none of them was material to the substance of our report.

So none of the stories he worked on need to be retracted, but does this mean ABC News won't inform viewers of its findings? Why not explain the detailed investigation that took place?

Also, an AP story about the memo that ABC has on its website seems to have a misleading headline. (This appears to be AP's doing, not ABC's; see here.) It reads, "ABC: No Errors Tied to 'Fake' Consultant." But Westin's memo clearly states that there are details and facts that can't be confirmed. Is that really the same as "no errors"? Also, the AP story does not detail the discrepancies outlined in the memo. Why not?

ABC News is also instituting changes to its practices:

There are three changes we are making in our internal practices based on what we've learned from this case.
Starting immediately, we will include both our News Practices team and the corporate Human Resources Department in the hiring of all consultants, reviewing in particular claims of prior employment and educational history. We will also undertake a review of current consultants where appropriate.
When we hire a consultant, we will make a determination of exactly how that person will be identified on all programs and platforms.
News Practices will be alerted each time that we include a consultant in our reporting to ensure that the consultant is being used and identified properly.
We undertake extensive efforts in all of our reporting — and particularly in our investigative reporting — to check and double-check information we are given so that no one source can compromise the truth of what we present to our audiences. Based on our review, our overall systems and procedures worked in the case of Mr. Debat. Nothing in our review, of course, condones the instances of resume enhancement or fake interviews that Mr. Debat published elsewhere.

Mirror (Eire Edition) apologizes, pays damages and legal fees for story from 1998

This apology, from the Irish edition of the Mirror, is a result of this court decision from last year.

ON June 10, 1998, under the headline "Burke in new pounds 30,000 probe" we published a report on pages one, two and three concerning Mr Denis O'Brien, the well-known businessman.
In that report we falsely stated an anonymous allegation had been made to the Flood Tribunal (as it then was) that Mr O'Brien had made a donation of pounds 30,000 to Ray Burke when he was Communications Minister and responsible for the allocation of radio licences in Ireland.
We also stated that Mr O'Brien's application for a licence for 98FM was successful.
We acknowledge Mr O'Brien made no donation of any description to Mr Burke and withdraw any suggestion to the contrary.
We also wrongly stated that Mr Burke was then responsible for the allocation of radio licences in Ireland.
In fact the Independent Radio and Television Commission was and remains the statutory body which oversees the granting of such licences.
We accept that our report was understood to mean that Mr O'Brien may have been guilty of conduct that warranted investigation by the Flood Tribunal and acknowledge that as a result the report was false and defamatory of him.
We withdraw any suggestion that Mr O'Brien acted in an unethical or improper manner or that he had done anything that warranted investigation by the Flood/Mahon Tribunal.
We unreservedly apologise to Mr O'Brien for the distress caused by our report and we acknowledge that he is entitled to a substantial sum in damages and to legal costs.

Sorry about calling you a killer

A story about Martin Ferrier that appeared in the Monday September 17 edition of 24 hours included the erroneous headline, "Ex-Killer 'Doing Good''. Mr. Ferrier has never been charged with or convicted of any homicide offence. 24 hours apologizes for the error.

A totally insufficient correction given the error. How did this happen?

Update on Alexis Debat story

The New York Times today published a piece by Bill Carter that contains more details about Debat's denials and ABC News' efforts to investigate his previous work for the network. Background on this story here. From the Times:

Alexis Debat, the former consultant to ABC News who has been accused of fabricating interviews with American political figures for a French magazine, strongly defended his reputation yesterday in a telephone interview...
Mr. Debat fought back yesterday against many of the charges against him, saying that he never conducted fake interviews, claiming that the issue of his Ph.D. degree arose from a misunderstanding with the Sorbonne (though he acknowledged he never received a diploma). He also said he welcomed ABC’s investigation.
“I am totally cooperating with them,” he said. “I am 100 percent confident that there will be no inaccuracies found in my reporting.”
But Rue 89, the French Web site that first reported suspicions that an interview with Senator Barack Obama was fake, continued to report new details that undermined Mr. Debat’s credibility. And the French Ministry of Defense tried to debunk his claims to have been an official or adviser in the ministry, saying he was little more than an intern...
ABC News has sent a producer to Pakistan as part of its second investigation into reports involving Mr. Debat. One report it is re-examining concerned a guerrilla organization called Jundullah, which, ABC reported in April, had the support of the United States and Pakistan for operations that led to the kidnapping and murder of several Iranian officials... Brian Ross, the correspondent who worked most closely with Mr. Debat, said the Jundullah story had many sources.
“We’re only worried about the things Debat supplied, not about the substance of that story,” he said.
...So far, ABC has found nothing that would undermine the stories Mr. Debat worked on, Mr. Ross said last night. But he acknowledged that as the stories of fabrications continue to roll in, the network “at some point has to question whether anything he said can be believed.”
ABC did cite some accounts that Mr. Debat accurately tried to warn the network against reporting. In one instance, ABC believed it had information that a terror suspect named Matiur Rehman had been captured in Pakistan in August 2006. Mr. Debat warned ABC it was not true. A day after the report was broadcast, ABC retracted it because Mr. Rehman had not been captured after all.
During the interview, Mr. Debat also denounced challenges of interviews with subjects including former President Bill Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York that Mr. Debat supplied to the French magazine Politique Internationale. All of those subjects have said they never met with Mr. Debat.
According to his account, the magazine set up the interviews, asked him to submit questions and translate the answers, and put his byline on the results. The editor of Politique Internationale, Patrick Wajsman, has been quoted widely saying that the explanation is untrue and that Mr. Debat is “a grand liar.”
Mr. Debat’s account was further undermined yesterday in a new report from Rue 89, which published an e-mail message from him to Politique Internationale discussing the interview with Mr. Bloomberg, in which he wrote: “The interview with Michael Bloomberg went well. It lasted a little less than one hour but I managed to go over all our questions.”
When asked about the report yesterday, Mr. Debat said, “I have no recollection of these e-mails.”
Similarly, when asked why he had told a reporter for Rue 89, Guillemette Faure, that his Ph.D. had come from the University of Edenvale in Britain, Mr. Debat said: “I never told her that. I know that university is a fake.”

Fabrication scandal hits (now former) ABC News consultant

Just as we were thinking that the summer had been relatively quiet, along comes what appears to be a serious fabrication scandal. It started with a story by Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post about how Alexis Debat, a former French defense official and consultant to ABC News, faked an interview with Barack Obama. Now it has turned into a widening scandal.
Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News has a comprehensive look at Debat's other transgressions. ABC also published an account about the fake Obama interview. Then it followed up with a rather shocking report:

Former President Bill Clinton, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan have added their names to the list of people who say they were the subjects of fake interviews published in a French foreign affairs journal under the name of Alexis Debat, a former ABC News consultant.
"This guy is just sick," said Patrick Wajsman, the editor of the magazine, Politique Internationale, a prestigious publication that has been in business for 29 years. Wajsman said he was removing all articles with Debat's byline from the magazine's Web site.

That same piece notes what ABC News is doing to examine his work for the network:

ABC News says it is reviewing all stories in which Debat has played a role.
"We investigated and could not establish his academic credentials," said ABC News senior vice president Jeffrey Schneider. Schneider said ABC News began a review of all of his work as a consultant but that so far, "our initial review has found that the information he provided ABC News checked out and was backed up by other sources."
Debat, who resigned yesterday as a senior fellow on counterterrorism issues at the Nixon Center, a Washington think tank, told ABCNews.com his only mistake was to allow his name to be put on interviews done by others.
Debat admitted he did not conduct interviews with Clinton, Pelosi, Bloomberg, Gates, Greenspan or Annan.

Let's hope ABC News continues to investigate Debat and delivers a full report. FishBowlNY also has an interesting email exchange with Debat.

Paper confuses local cop with man charged with sexual abuse

The Kane County Chronicle incorrectly published a photo of St. Charles Police Sgt. Don Shaw in a story on 1A Tuesday about former West Aurora High School teacher and coach Curtis Shaw. The photograph incorrectly identified Sgt. Don Shaw as Curtis Shaw. The photo with this online story is the correct photo.
Sgt. Don Shaw has no connection or affiliation with Curtis Shaw or with the criminal court case in which Curtis Shaw is accused.
The Chronicle will print a front-page correction to this error in its Wednesday, Sept. 12 edition. The Chronicle regrets this error. Link

Curtis Shaw is charged with criminal sexual abuse. It was a good decision for the paper to put a correction online the day of the error and offer a front page correction the following day. They might consider running the correction in the paper for more that one day.

Apology

ON 20 and 21 February we published articles which wrongly alleged Caprice was in rehab in the Priory in London. We accept these allegations are untrue and we are happy to make clear that Caprice was not and has never been in rehab in the Priory or anywhere else.
We apologise to Caprice for the embarrassment caused. Link

The Local gets ripped off, again

Last November we posted an item about how The Local, an English language news website in Sweden, had claimed that Chinese news service Xinhua was stealing its articles. Last week The Local noted that several of its articles had apparently been plagiarized by SR, the Swedish public radio broadcaster. SR eventually posted a "clarification" about the situation, which The Local Accepted. From The Local:

...Closer examination revealed that more than a dozen news articles were pretty much copied and pasted from The Local, and some were read aloud on the radio.
We made inquiries with Radio Sweden, who took down the articles and apologised to us personally. On Wednesday, an article about this appeared on the website of media industry magazine Resumé, after which SR published a clarification in English  and Swedish on its website.
We were naturally disappointed that this happened in the first place, fearing that our readers could conclude that we had plagiarised Radio Sweden. We are reassured by SR’s clarification and thank them for their prompt response.

Mirror (UK) misidentifies man as terrorist

ON 1st May whilst reporting the Bluewater terror plot we printed the above picture of Abdul Hadi Awang and said that he was the Al Qaeda number 3 who had been captured last year and was being held in Guantanamo Bay. This is incorrect and the photograph was published in error. Our article intended to refer to a completely different person, Abdul Hadi al Iraqi. Abdul Hadi Awang is President of PAS, a leading democratic political party in Malaysia, and he has no connection with Abdul Hadi al Iraqi. Mr Awang is not and has never been a member of AI Qaeda and is opposed to their acts of terrorism. Mr Awang has never been so much as questioned or arrested in connection with terrorism, or held in Guantanamo Bay. We apologise to Mr Awang for any distress or embarrassment caused. Link