Age of Autism piece on Specter, 30 Nov

[cwbpi]

November 30, 2009
Olmsted on Autism: Tell Jon Stewart the Truth About "Denialist"
Michael Specter

By Dan Olmsted

Thursday, December 3, Jon Stewart will interview “Denialism” author
Michael Specter on The Daily Show. The show, which helps shape the
Zeitgeist, actively solicits comments from viewers, and I think we all
ought to take them up on it, HERE. (Please also post your comments to
this article and we’ll send them the whole thing.)

Michael Specter, you may recall, was the subject of my post in which I
noted that he had plagiarized a significant passage from Paul Offit’s
New England Journal of Medicine article making mincemeat of the Poling
case, and had also committed several bad errors. The worst was saying
that parent pressure – not the federal government – was behind the
1999 decision to ask drug companies to phase out thimerosal from
infant vaccines. This, I said, is the sign of someone who doesn’t know
what he’s talking about and whose default mode is to blame the other
side for everything – a rather major problem if your entire point is
that OTHER PEOPLE don’t know what they’re talking about and are
hurling accusations about with reckless abandon. (He also doesn’t know
what encephalopathy means or when the MMR, the most controversial of
any single vaccine, was approved.) It was once-over-lightly, hit-and-
run, a journalistic drive-by shooting of the kind we are so familiar
with now, but as I suggested the only target Specter managed to hit
was his foot.

After our story ran, and to his credit, Specter apologized on his Web
site under the headline: My Mistake and an Apology to Paul Offit.
“There is nothing more important to me than accuracy, and there is no
place in my book, ‘Denialism,’ where I tried harder to avoid careless
mistakes than in the chapter called ‘Vaccines and the Great Denial.’
I didn't succeed, though, and I want to make sure readers are aware of
that. ... It was an accidental oversight which I will correct as soon
as new copies of the book are printed. I told Dr. Offit about the
mistake as soon as I realized I had made it [in other words, as soon
as WE told him he had made it!], and, as always, he was gracious. But
I also wanted to make readers aware of the error, which I regret.”


While sincere, there are a few things about this apology that are less
than satisfying. Specter didn’t mention the factual errors, which,
when piled on top of the plagiarism, make his work look much worse.
They suggest a habit of carelessness that he would prefer not to call
attention to – as does the fact Specter has been down this road
before, in an article he wrote in 2007 on spam. After my article, a
reader sent me the following e-mail from Specter to a reader who had
spotted the same problem back then.


“Michael Specter says:


August 7, 2007 at 2:04 pm


Dear Ms. Seebach:


I saw your blog entry on my Spam piece in last week’s New Yorker and
wanted to let you know what happened. The short answer is I screwed
up; a longer one would, I hope, make it clear to you that there was
no
plagiarism in the mistake or the story. … At some point during the two
months I worked on the piece I pasted their description of spam
“supermarkets” into the text, giving them proper credit. Later I moved
the sentences around, and in doing so I
separated that material from
the attribution – which, while absolutely
improper, was not
intentional. I suspect I didn’t notice my
error because I had learned
the information from several other sources as well. I hope it is
obvious to you that if I had wanted to pass off a sentence from
somebody else’s work as my own I would have never
pointed readers
toward Spamhaus at all, let alone in that same paragraph.


Sincerely,
Michael Specter
Staff Writer.”



Yes, yes, of course, no one would do anything like that intentionally,
a point Specter made in the same way to me: Had it been plagiarism, he
told me, “maybe I would have been smart enough not to point the reader
to the very NEJM story I was supposedly plagiarizing in that very
passage.”

No doubt, but plagiarism is about results, not intentions – extreme
sloppiness and lack of original thinking does not “excuse” it any more
than doing it deliberately. Either way, the apology is welcome – or,
it would have been if it were not solely addressed to the always-
gracious Paul Offit. “My Mistake and an Apology to Paul Offit” should
have read “My Mistake and an Apology to My Readers.” The offense is
against the people who spent the money and invested the trust in the
writer, not against the coziest and most trusted source whose views
come through in every paragraph, whether they have quote marks around
them or not.

Oh, and one last thing. The book had no footnotes, and Specter has
been promising to post them on his Web site. When I checked Friday,
they were still “coming soon” – for a book published a full month ago.
Nice – an author challenging the views of so many others can get
through all his public appearances before anyone can double-check the
basis for his own. I for one will be taking a close look at them
WHENEVER they show up.


If Michael Specter wants to be Paul Offit’s finger-puppet, so be it.
But maybe he should cancel some of his media gigs until he gets his
footnotes done and his facts straight.

Dan Olmsted is Editor of Age of Autism