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It’s really a problem of journalism itself

by Kerim on October 17th, 2010

I woke up this morning to discover that the NY Times public editor, Arthur
Brisbane, had responded to the objections I had raised in my post about how Guy
Deutscher’s article looked a lot like Lera Boroditsky’s.

The problem here, I conclude, is not one of intellectual theft. It’s really
a problem of journalism itself.

The rules of attribution and credit in the domain of scholarship are

established, strict and well-understood. Journalism, by contrast, lacks a
formal code for citing scholarly work. When scholarly subject matter
traverses the border into popular journalism, it simply isn’t clear how
much attribution is enough.

That was pretty much the stance I took in my initial blog post as well. But Guy
Deutscher takes a more aggressive stance, accusing Arthur Brisbane of
misrepresenting Michael Silverstein’s stated position:

The way he paraphrased Mr. Silverstein’s response can easily be

construed as giving at least partial credence to Ms. Boroditsky’s claims
to important contributions that I should have cited instead of or
alongside the seminal ones I named. I asked Mr. Silverstein what he had
actually said, and it turns out to have been the opposite. He had
described Ms. Boroditsky’s examples as “in essence reproducing others’
results long in the literature.” Mr. Brisbane chose not to mention
that.The way he paraphrased Mr. Silverstein’s response can easily be
construed as giving at least partial credence to Ms. Boroditsky’s claims
 to important contributions that I should have cited instead of or
alongside the seminal ones I named. I asked Mr. Silverstein what he had
actually said, and it turns out to have been the opposite. He had
described Ms. Boroditsky’s examples as “in essence reproducing others’
results long in the literature.” Mr. Brisbane chose not to mention that.

No hard feelings though, since he also says that “Ms. Boroditsky is one of the many
who are specifically credited and praised in the book, and two of her experiments
are described there in detail.”
There are also some letters posted on the NY Times website, and some discussion
over at Language Log.
I should also mention that Guy Deutscher responded to Kathryn Woolard’s initial post on the Society
for Linguistic Anthropology blog:

In the book I make even stronger criticisms of Whorf’s argumentation

and his representation of linguistic facts. But as opposed to the article,
these criticisms are made in context, and are discussed with relation to
particular examples that Whorf used and quotation from Whorf’s work,
e.g. his claims about the alleged timelessness of the Hopi language and
its alleged influence on the Hopi’s inability to understand the concept of
time as we know it. I don’t think I caricaturized his position – I’m
afraid he doesn’t need much caricaturizing there.

It seems that if we just read Guy Deutscher’s book, as opposed to his journalism, all
doubts will be erased. Is there any hope for public intellectuals in the news media?

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