We Have A Winner!
The winner of the Stageleft “Hyperbole of the Zillenium” prize goes by an enormous margin to Right Girl, who scooped 32% of the vote with her paen to Mark Steyn, and her poignant description of saluting ovaries.
A copy of Charles McKay’s “Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” will be send to both Dr. Dawg and Right Girl hersel: winners, you can send me your preferred mailing/shipping address privately at balbulican@stageleft.info.
Both RG and the Dawg pointed out that RG’s ode to Alpha Males was at best tangential to the matter at hand, and we agree…but it was such a delightfully weird digression, and it did contain the word “Steyn”, and it was clearly a reader fave…so what the heck.
In the interests of fairness, however, we will also provide a prize to the person who spotted the second place winner, the quote from a Pajamas Media that placed Steyn and Shaidle at the “fulcrum” of liberty with the American revolutionaries. Let’s see, that eagle eyed-spotter would be…hey, me! I win!
Hey! Conflict of interest!
What can I say? The Readers Have Spoken!
I think the winner of the hyperbole contest should have been David Warren’s eighth (of thirteen) columns from Feb. 17, 2008. Not only for his prognostication regarding witchcraft trials, but because the article demonstrated graphically the more serious problems associated with this kind of “opinion” – the kind of reporting that accompanies it.
Warren made use of a misattributed photo from an amateur extremist website (debunked as a fake story in 2005), to describe a supposed Sharia punishment in Iran – one in which a little boy gets his arm amputated under the wheels of a truck. (Steyn refers his MacLeans readers to Warren’s articles in his own many columns on the issue).
More disturbing, this false information (of which there are many other examples in Warren’s work) was caught by readers, not editors, and other instances are left to stand unacknowledged and uncorrected. It illustrates the fact that editors routinely fail to check the sources and accuracy of negative reporting (not opinion) related to those groups who are also exposed to inflammatory and derogatory comment from the same authors.
The manner in which this issue was handled at the Citizen when it was brought to their attention, and on Warren’s website collection of his “copyright Ottawa Citizen” articles, raises more ethical questions. See Regret the Error for the retraction, followed by an example of the kinds of websites which can constitute Warren’s routinely undisclosed “sources”:
http://www.regrettheerror.com/newspapers/mea-culpa-mea-culpa
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2005/10/the_week_in_isr.html
In running the retraction in a subsequent, unrelated Warren column on Feb. 20, 2008, it is not flagged as an error in the electronic archive as would have been the case if it had been run as a correction, or if they had published the letter to the editor which pointed it out.
Regarding the way the error is presented on his website, in a 2003 Citizen column acknowledging a few of his many other errors, Warren states: “I have faithfully posted everything I’ve written in newspapers since 9/11 on my davidwarrenonline.com website, warts and all.” On the site, he states “There may be slight differences in text from printed versions, owing to editorial interventions; in all cases what you read here is what I originally wrote, & with my own suggested titles.”
But on his website the “copyright Ottawa Citizen” version of the original article removes the initial reference to the Sharia punishment (not before it had been disseminated across the web with the legitimacy of a canada.com story to the kinds of sites where it originally ran with a retraction in 2005). On davidwarrenonline.com the Feb. 20 article which carried Warren’s half-hearted retraction replaces the acknowledgment of his error with a wholly different (and ironic) paragraph. See the different versions of the last paragraph linked below. The second link is to a site where Warren’s website version is posted, as his site is occasionally unavailable .
http://www.canada.com/scripts/story.html?id=30ad1978-5fc7-4d86-b30f-bbd218a346e4&k=76388&p=1
http://archives.zinester.com/14807/153237.html
There are many more unacknowledged issues related to reporting, rather than opinion, in Warren’s work – a more serious issue, I think, than Steyn’s writings.
Interesting too that both Steyn and Warren come from arts or entertainment, both apparently left school at 16, and have no relevant education for their positions as commentators on subjects like Islam.
Holy crap! I won! I won! And I didn’t even answer the skill-testing question! (51, for those in the know. No, actually, 51. Or 52.)