Agenda on John Manukia
October 29th, 2005 at 9:09 am by David FarrarSimon Pound on Agenda has just done a story on what appears to be several more fake stories by John Manukia. I’ll link to the transcript when it is up.
The Herald on Sunday has a duty to do what other newspapers (such as the New York Times did) when they find a journalist has fabricated at least one story, and to do a full audit of all recent stories by that journalist. It reflects extremely badly on them that other media are doing this for them.
US newspapers employ a staff member purely as a fact checker, to verify key details of stories. This is not fool proof, but helps with accuracy. Do NZ media do this? Should they?
The Herald on Sunday needs to fess up tomorrow with the results of their own internal investigations into other stories by John Manukia. A continued silence will damage their credibility even further.
Tags: Media
October 29th, 2005 at 10:11 am
Well, another reason not to regret cancelling the sub to the Herald on Sunday. Then again, I hope the Sunday Star-Times won’t be doing too much gloating tomorrow. At least John Manukia got fired. Precisely NOBODY connected with the Operation Leaf debacle lost their jobs.
Vote:October 29th, 2005 at 10:24 am
I think this shows some real weaknesses in the editorial standards of the NZ Herald. They would like to think it stops with the journalist but I bet it does not. The newspapers go on about blogland but no-one simply no-one thinks that a product published as “news” represents the truth.
Vote:October 29th, 2005 at 11:23 am
The weakness doesn’t seem to reside just with the Herald.
Vote:October 29th, 2005 at 12:07 pm
Considering how the Herald was willing to be a Maxim mouthpiece no matter what plagiarised rubbish they got offered, I think maybe Bruce Logan et al have been the models for Herald journalistic practices.
Vote:October 29th, 2005 at 1:49 pm
right Mikey, newspaper publishes contributions that are derivative or plagiarised, which is *just* exactly the same as employing journalists who make shit up
The maxim “crime” as I understood it was not to attribute sources, rather than that the stories/opinions were fake.
yup round 1: standard left wing moral equivalence defence – next!
Vote:October 29th, 2005 at 2:13 pm
fairfax says it’ll check out stories written by Manukia when he worked for them. It seems weird APN hasn’t followed suit.
Has anyone read the stories he wrote based on the fictional interview? I went to the library to find a copy of the HOS, but, strangely, it was missing.
My John Campbell Tribute Gallery
Vote:October 29th, 2005 at 2:24 pm
Mikey-bill – While you’ve got your thinking cap on you might like to explain in a bit more detail how not crediting all the sources and references to a story is the same as completely fabricating a whole story out of thin air (commonly known as “lying” in the real world).
I know lefties commonly interchange lies and facts, and possibly forget how to differentiate after so much practice. BTW don’t bother with the “lying by omission” arguement – lefties are champions of that tactic as well.
Vote:October 29th, 2005 at 2:34 pm
Jose Barbosa – thanks for the John-boy tribute pix. Most glaring omission though is my personal favorite: the plaintive, puppy-dog look he often delivers sometimes when he signs off (he just wants to be loved so much!)
Vote:October 29th, 2005 at 5:03 pm
I suppose Manukia thought if Helen CLARK could anonymously feed a false story to the Dominion then it would be okay to follow her example as a reporter for the Herald on Sunday.
Vote:October 30th, 2005 at 12:43 am
Mikey Bill:
What a fucking stupid thing to say. I’ve worked as a journalist and been blogging for the last three years, on and off. I’ll put my hand up and cop to sloppy attribution. I even apologised to Russell Brown after an unintentional, but still unforgivable, badly edited quote from HN that seriously misrepresented him.
But equating that with fabricating a whole interview – and presenting fake notes to your editor! – that was the sole basis for a 2 1/2 page NEWS story (NOT an opinion piece) is so far OTT I have to laugh.
I sincerely hope APN will take this a little more seriously than you, Mikey Bill. While I may not be a fan of the Herald’s editorial line, I would hope that the the difference between fact and fiction is respected, and those reporters who do don’t see their credibility tainted by association.
Vote:October 30th, 2005 at 2:27 am
My my my, such a reaction!
Manukia lied and broke basic rules of ethical journalism.
Logan lied and broke basic rules of ethical academic writing.
There are obvious parallels here.
Vote:October 30th, 2005 at 9:23 am
I think you’re jumping on Mikey a touch hard here. The Logan issue was never one of sloppy attribution – every journalist has done that at some point – but one of plagiarism. Sloppy attribution involves making mistakes in who you attribute a given quotation to, or maybe missing some quotation marks by accident. The Maxim articles were clear examples of plagiarism, which is quite different – trying to pass off a quotation as your own words. It’s entirely possible to forget some quotes. It’s entirely possible to forget your attribution for a quote. But doing both? Come off it, mate. And doing both, repeatedly? That’s deliberate, sorry. Logan admitted as much in the Herald afterwards – he claimed that he would write stuff down on paper and not bother noting down where it came from. He would then include those words in his writing, devoid of any suggestion that they might not be his. His justification didn’t excuse him, it just suggested that he’s such a poor writer that plagiarism is actually built into his writing workflow as a standard procedure.
You get fired for that kind of thing, and you’d get kicked out of any decent university for the number of repeat offences Logan pulled.
I think Mikey’s point is that writing fictional articles and clear cases of plagiarism are BOTH serious enough to be obvious no-second-chance firing offences at any respectable newspaper. So OK, maybe there’s no MORAL equivalence but there’s certainly a practical one – do it, get fired.
That said, I can understand Logan’s thought process a little better than Manukia’s – at least Logan could sensibly think “Nobody I’m ripping off reads this shit anyway, I’ll get away with it”. There was a good chance he could slip his lazy writing past the editors and it was only after his daughter swiped something wholesale from an article of his printed in another NZ newspaper that alarm bells went off and people started checking his work. Realistically, he could well have got away with it.
Manukia on the other hand is just head-scratchingly weird. What, you think you can make up a feature-length interview with a high-profile subject in a major newspaper… and not have them notice it? It’s almost like he was asking to get caught!
Vote:October 30th, 2005 at 10:52 am
sorry err, my point was that this was the classic lefty moral equivalence line.
Nobody has defended Maxim and this issue wasnt about Maxim, it was about Manukia. Mikey raised the Maxim issue, for the only apparent reason of diminishing the seriousness of the issue.
What could possibly be the interpretations of his decision to comment?
either
a) right wingers do it to, which apparently reduces the severity of the crime; or
b) red herring to misdirect and thereby reduce the impact of the story
I struggle to find an innocent reason for raising the Maxim story in a comment about a reporter who completely FAKED an interview – this wasnt plagiarism this was fantasy!
Vote:October 30th, 2005 at 11:12 am
“Moral equivalence”, that magic ointment that hypocrites use to make believe they are cured.
Vote:October 30th, 2005 at 2:16 pm
Of course all the lefties will now be dropping “Doctor” Martin Luther King from their list of heroes – his 1955 doctoral thesis was 45% plagiarised (ie. lifted, stolen, half-inched…) and passed off as his own. Boston University now accepts that there were “serious improprieties” with his copying/work. How can we trust ANY of the utterings of such an obviously dishonest lying cheat?
Ref: Graeme Davidson (Religion & Ethics)
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