Lee Wilkins, a Missouri School of Journalism professor and the editor of the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, who also reviewed examples from the book, said, “The general rule in journalism is you cite the source of your information. Secondly, the norm in journalism is we don’t steal. I would regard this as a violation of academic (honesty).”
Keller, also a Herald contributor, referred questions to his book editor and said the editor told him that footnotes were not necessary. Editor Michael Flamini did not return requests for comment…..
The newspaper articles Keller used date as far back as 1988 to as recent as 2006, covering such issues as the 2006 deadly Big Dig collapse, a city hall “holiday tree” flap and gay marriage. In some instances, multiple quotes are lifted from a single article.
Keller’s 250-page text on Bay State politics has an index, and the book does credit some of the material he culled from the Globe and Herald.
But Keller’s book does not have any footnotes, chapter notes or a bibliography. According to Freedman, that leads the “reader to think, ‘Gee, this enterprising author did all these interviews. How impressive. How hard-working,’ and it’s the opposite. All he did was take quotes that other journalists had gotten and then passed them off as if he was the person who had gotten the quotes.
“Any working journalist,” Freedman added, “would know these basic rules.”
It’s bad enough that Keller is so self-satisified. But you can’t justify being full of yourself in public when you’re this lazy.
…I bought a copy of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in 1964, when it first came out in paperback. It was by far the longest paperback book (by number of pages) and by at least half the most expensive paperback book.
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At 1600 pages it had over 200 pages of endnotes.
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Despite the book’s problems (Shirer did not have access to the East German archives when he was writing the book) Shirer was a journalist, and he knew the importance of citations.
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The fact that Keller is not willing to cite to sources for his assertions of fact is unforgivable.
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It doesn’t matter whether Keller was
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All he did was take quotes that other journalists had gotten and then passed them off as if he was the person who had gotten the quotes
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he could have had endnotes indicating “personal communication” for quotations that he got directly. It isn’t that difficult.
The inconvenient truth must be suppressed and discredited somehow.
… why distrust someone unethical?
I’ve spent many hours “refuting the content” of Keller’s book — at least, the part of the content that needs refuting (and there’s a good deal of it). And I’ve only gotten through chapter 4 — when I find the time, there’s plenty more to come. The “format,” as you call it, is yet another knock on the book.
offered a legitimate critique. The mainstream media in the absence of critiquing content, as you did, appears more interested in attacking it’s omission of reference acknowledgements to discredit the book.
… that the Herald author didn’t read the book? Are you saying that the citation issue isn’t a legitimate topic for discussion of the book?
… its possible, but then people should take that up with her not me.
… is to invite scrutiny by making things easier to verify and / or refute. The work, should it survive such scrutiny, can then be said to be a strong work. This kind of scrutiny is particularly salient toward works that claim a thesis (such as ‘Massachusetts is overly liberal’).
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I reason to avoid the format might be to avoid such scrutiny because… Well I think we can see now why Keller might have chosen not to cite.
article
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Keller’s editor Michael Flamini, advised that footnotes were not necessary. There is an index in the book referencing sources but this did not meet with the approval of acadamians from Columbia ( now there’s a school with credibility these days) who bashed the book because of footnote omission but offered no critique regarding content.
… maybe that means Keller got bad advise. Still doesn’t make the issue go away. Its still a problem with the book.
as long as he properly cites his quotations in the text, which he did not.
Keller is seeking to hide something? truths, facts etc?
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Having now read the book, I could not discover anything that was untrue or was a lie. If you can point to something that is, I’d welcome the observation. To me , that’s far more important than format correctness.
… he protects himself from scrutiny. As David has already shown, he seems to need the protection. If he’s not ‘man enough’ to stand up to scrutiny why should I give him the time of day?
completely able to pontificate on its shortcomings based on heresay ..please…, talk about a lack of references….
… the book to know that
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a) It has a thesis (about Massachusetts and liberalism)
b) It quotes works by others.
c) It lacks citations
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In my opinion any book that that has a thesis and quotes works by others should have citations. John Keller’s book seems to fall into my ‘any book’ criteria. Of course criticizing it’s content without reading it would indeed have been dirty pool, but that’s not what I did now is it? I’ve criticized its lack of citations, which is the subject of the thread.
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Feel free to find a liberal book that meet the criteria above and criticize its lack of citations on the same grounds and I’ll promise not to question your doing so.
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The lack of citations isn’t, in and of itself, sufficient to dismiss the book (and I have not done so). Of course I have lots of other good reasons beyond citations (not mentioned thus far) to dismiss the book:
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a) Written by John Keller
b) Negatively reviewed by people whose opinions I respect
c) Written by John Keller
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See… I have all the reasons necessary to dismiss the book, none of which require me to go through the pain of slopping through it (thanks David!).
actually read the book and generate reviews to counter the growing success of Keller’s factual expose of Mass politics as to how and why it is a one party State and how that could be a recipe for national disaster.
Sales are booming and it’s getting great reviews and it is well on its way to best sellerville…this one will open a lot of eyes nationally
b) It quotes works by others.
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It purports to quote works by others. There is a difference.
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Two points. Even if Keller’s quotation is accurate, it does not provide the context for the quotation and, in my experience, context is everything. And, since Keller did not provide the citation, he did not provide a mechanism by which the context could be determined.
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That is the problem with Keller’s lack of citations.
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I seriously don’t pay attention any more to books that don’t have citations to sources.
… One of the reason I added ‘refute’ to ‘verify’ above is because of the dissembling that can happen when taking an entirely accurate quote out of context. In order to detect the issue you must go back to the source, thus providing an even more compelling reason that there should be citations.
…I’ll merely cite the example of the press’s claiming that Al Gore “found” Love Canal as an example of environmental depredation. With apologies to Dan Kennedy, who often posts here, I don’t believe much of what I read in the supposedly unbiased American media much any more.
Don’t you remember the basic instruction you got in high school when writing an English or history paper — if you’re going to quote, cite the source. I certainly remember this when I took journalism as a high school freshman. Content aside, my objection is the ethics — or lack thereof — of stealing other people’s work and passing it off as your own. What Keller has done is nothing short of plagarism. Ron Borges lost his job at the Globe for a far milder level of the same act.
When you dan’t refute the content, bash the format.
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…I don’t have to make a case. I don’t have to refute any content. It is up to Keller to make, and defend, his case. His unwillingness to do so is, quite frankly, quite damning of his thesis, and certainly quite damning of his ability to make a case.
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I recognize that Keller is not publishing in the academic press (neither was Shirer, for that matter), but I have read a number of articles in the academic press in the hard sciences. If Keller wants to be taken as to anything other than an idiot polemiscist, then he should cite to source. He hasn’t cited to sources. Shirer did, hence my counter-example.
format bashing , lack of footnotes in the world will not prevent that.
Americans love scandal, political intrigue and tales of fallen pols and corruption. This one’s got it all and a best seller all the way..Who knows? maybe jack Nicholson will come back to do a reprise of “the departed” Whitey Bulger story only this time Jack can portray his incredibly corrupt brother Billy based on Keller’s book…LMAO!
I guess literally speaking, he already has. According to the Herald article:
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in a few more weeks. I’ll have a nice bottle of A-1 sauce ready for you to baste your crow sandwich with.
Yuck. If the time comes, I’ll take my crow Buffalo-style. Otherwise, I’ll see you in a few months at Keller’s book debut at Buck-A-Book or the Ocean State Job Lot.
Keller’s will be too….try the A-1 on fowl..different
…a number of copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion have been distributed, too. That doesn’t suggest that Protocols has any relationship to reality, does it?
pop..snap Ah, Earhh snappop Earth to raj!crakleeeee snap Earth to Raj.sssssshhhhsshzzz Come in Raj! Earth to raj…Over… hisssssnap..chshsh.. Waht the F are you talking about ? oVER ..HSSSSSS SNAPPPP ..over..sssssssss
I am surprised that someone of your alleged age would not have heard of the Protocols before, but your ignorance could easily have been corrected by a five minute google search. I don’t think that raj’s analogy is particularly apt to this situation, but I don’t think that any intelligent person with access to the internet would have any trouble understanding it.
…a sh!t load of books, too. Is distribution supposed to be a sign of veracity?