June 03, 2003

COLLUSION CONFUSION

The ABC can’t get anything right:

In an article by ABC news and current affairs director Max Uechtritz on Friday's Opinion page, comments by Dr Martin Hirst of Queensland University were not attributed to Dr Hirst.

The inadvertent omission of the attribution occurred in the ABC's editing of the article before it was submitted to The Age.

Weird. The structure of the Uechtritz piece doesn’t really allow for easy attribution of Hirst's lines (which, even weirder, were published in a letter from Hirst to The Australian on the same day Uechtritz’s piece appeared). Something stupid is afoot.

Posted by Tim Blair at June 3, 2003 05:21 AM
Comments

Tim,

You're being churlish now.
You've had a little win. The ABC have acknowledged their error, as you were forced to do when you stuffed up on the Pentagon Flag story.

Time to elevate your line of debate up a notch old fella. I would suggest going to Gary Sauer Thompson's blog and learning how to go about crafting an argument on this subject.

Rex

Posted by: Rex Ringschott at June 3, 2003 at 09:39 AM

Come on. This is a plagiarism case. The only mistake is that they got caught. It seems pretty likely that the pro-ABC academic sends ideas to journalists who run them with slight revisions. This time they got caught because the academic also sent it as a letter to the editor. OOPS!

Posted by: jim at June 3, 2003 at 09:58 AM

Rex,

You got that flag story a bit wrong. Blair said that it came from the Pentagon on Sept. 11. It did. The only question was whether it was under or above the rubble, which by the way, I haven't heard any solid info on as yet.

Posted by: jim at June 3, 2003 at 10:34 AM

Good advice, Rex! I'll head over to Gary's site right now and ... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Posted by: tim at June 3, 2003 at 10:35 AM

Tim, no matter how much you jump up and down, spit the dummy and bite the carpet, they're not going to give you your show back.

Sorry mate, it's just not going to happen. Come on, Murdoch and Packer should be good enough for you.

I mean, I don't know what they're paying you, but the Bully pays regular freelancers in the order of 70c a word...

Posted by: Bon Scott at June 3, 2003 at 11:12 AM

This is dodgy. Tim's right to harp on it.

Posted by: Robert at June 3, 2003 at 01:14 PM

Where is Max U spending next ANZAC Day?

Posted by: Razor at June 3, 2003 at 05:13 PM

Bon - master of the cutting retort!

Posted by: tim at June 3, 2003 at 05:40 PM

"Time to elevate your line of debate up a notch old fella."

and

"and learning how to go about crafting an argument"

This from someone who's didn't even last 3 sentences before trying to change the subject onto something totally unrelated. Why should he bother to elevate his line of debate a notch or two when he only has to deal with arguments like yours (or even worse, Bons)

Posted by: Richard at June 3, 2003 at 07:04 PM

Robert's right, this is dodgy. Hell, the ABC is dodgy. Harp away Tim. (Please keep it simple, I haven't watched the ABC much of late and my intellect is starting to suffer.)

Posted by: ZsaZsa at June 3, 2003 at 10:56 PM