From chapter two of Amusing Ourselves to Death, this quote brought about thought in my mind what is this difference whether something is published or orally sourced. Now I'm not going to argue that one is better than the other because that is merely a matter of opinion but I will say that they can both be equally truthful and deceiving.
I recently watched a movie with my mom for her journalism class. This film about a true story was Shattered Glass. In this film a man writes for a big magazine and produces many great articles that all go through long processes of editing and changing before getting published. One time he writes a fantastic article about how this great hacker makes a lot of money. This leads to another company checking his work, and calling him out on it. This reveals that half of his articles that he produced were bogus. Now his work was published and it did go through many different editors and what if somebody were to use this to cite their work or something from another magazine or even a book. This is just one example that just because something is published doesn't mean it is true. Although this can also be used to show that citing someone orally doesn't necessarily mean its true either because that reporter Stephen Glass supposedly had many witnesses and in fact none checked out.
In the case in the book I see no reason for the scholar to be told anything for citing the speech. He did it in the correct form and even provided witnesses. Now if the professors had anything to say they could of asked him to bring about the witnesses so that he could prove his case. Now if the man could not provide witnesses or he did not cite witnesses then the professors have every right to tell him as they did.
Now anyone could make up a book source and say that they used a certain part of the text as easily as they could make up an oral source. So I guess the question of which is a more valid account or source of the truth really depends on the situation. What do you think?
It's so much harder to make up a book source now than it was ten years ago. Now teachers can just google the book to make sure it exists. But it's so true that people do it everyday.
ReplyDeleteStephen Glass just wanted to garner as much attention as he could with "hard-hitting" news stories that never happened. It's a horrible thing to make something up in a journalism setting. Well, it's horrible to make things up anywhere, but even worse on a newspaper.
Your right about it being much easier with the boom of the internet for a teacher to check student work just by entering the passage on any given search engine. Which makes it seem more ridiculous when people do that today.
ReplyDeleteThe worst part about what Stephen Glass had did was that he had done it so many times and got away with it. Some people use magazines such as that one as sources of information in their work. So when he was found to have made up the articles its anyones guess how many people he mislead and messed up.
I think that's an even better reason not to take quotes from speech. If something is taken from speech it is much harder to make an exact quote, which in this case the student was doing, rather than a summary of what was being said. The fact that Stephen Glass got away with it for so long without being caught in his lies is a good reason to limit quoting of something that usually presents lies as facts in this case verbal speech. This is the same reason that websites like wikipedia are not allowed to be used in official reports.
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