Quadrant falls victim to its own reasoning, ain't we all so desperate to attend to what we want to hear, even nit picker conservatives like Windy. The following item is a classic one from today's Sydney Morning Herald.
A hoax aimed at Keith Windschuttle and Quadrant was elaborately
planned, writes David Marr.
AFTER a terrible two hours, Keith Windschuttle convinced himself he hadn't been hoaxed at all. He was greatly relieved. How embarrassing such a stumble could have been for this fierce nitpicker, scourge of sloppy academics and current editor of the conservative Quadrant magazine.
"It was a shock when I got the call," Windschuttle told the Herald. It came at 9.30 yesterday morning, warning him that an article in the current issue of his magazine was a fake perpetrated by the non-existent "Sharon Gould" posing as a 41-year-old New Yorker based in Brisbane. His heart sank but he got to work.
He had published "Scare campaigns and science reporting" without checking what he called the "nitty gritty" of its facts, and he had put it in the magazine without showing it to anyone familiar with its subject, genetic engineering. But in two busy hours yesterday he was able to satisfy himself the article was "only 10 to 15 per cent invented. When I discovered that my gloom and embarrassment changed completely."
After Margaret Simons broke the story in the online newsletter Crikey yesterday, Windschuttle hit back on his own website declaring the "Gould" article "simply a piece of fraudulent journalism submitted to Quadrant under false pretences". After a bit more thought he added that Crikey's editor, Jonathan Green, "should be aware that his publication's involvement in the manufacture of this story is unethical".
The hoax was beautifully done. Provoked by Quadrant's embrace of global warming sceptics, the unidentified hoaxer concocted the article early last year and sent it to Windschuttle. The aim was to "employ some of Quadrant's sleight-of-hand reasoning devices to argue something ludicrous", the hoaxer later wrote. "Something like the importance of putting human genes into food crops to save civilisation from its own ills, and how this sort of science shouldn't be scrutinised by the media because, you know, it's empirical."
She - or perhaps he - waited patiently until August before contacting Windschuttle and asking if Quadrant was interested. He had lost the article. Could she send it again? She did and he took it up enthusiastically. Windschuttle is right to say that it had every appearance of genuineness. It was a good hoax. But had he checked its key claims, the whole article would have unravelled.
The hoaxer wrote that "buried" in the footnotes of a scientific paper was the remarkable story that the CSIRO had been deterred from commercialising a great breakthrough in genetic engineering "because of perceived moral issues among the public". The paper exists. So do its authors. But it is not about genetic engineering, and as those familiar with scientific publications know, such papers never have footnotes.
Windschuttle didn't check the paper or ring the CSIRO. He says: "We're not a science journal." But in any case, he doesn't believe Quadrant has to check the facts in its articles. Though he has flayed historians for small errors in obscure footnotes in the past, he doesn't believe his handling of the article falls short of his own standards. "I am not the author in this case. I'm the editor."
The hoaxer reported on his or her blog: "So neatly did my essay conform with reactionary ideology that Quadrant, it seems, didn't even check the putative author's credentials."
Windschuttle, meanwhile, argues that only the name of the author was fake. "A real person wrote that article."
And real people wrote "Ern Malley's" poetry. Quadrant's first editor, James McAuley, was one of the perpetrators of that great hoax. Was Windschuttle willing to reflect on the ironies, the connections, the contrasts?
"I don't want to go there."
No comments:
Post a Comment