Tuesday, April 02, 2013
Mad About the Cost of TV? Blame Sports
(www.theatlantic.com)
Your cable bill—$80 or $90, or whatever it is—is best understood as two prices. The programming (i.e. the channels you watch) and the distribution (i.e. the infrastructure and profits for the cable companies). Every time you pay a cable bill, the channels collect a small fee. It’s called an “affiliate fee.” The most in-demand channels tend to negotiate the highest fees. And those tend to be sports channels. Take a look.
Read More...By my rough calculation, if you pay $90 a month for cable, you are ...
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1 2 >Whereas I can't think of a more productive way for Mark Sanchez to spend his time.
I suppose--but it's not like ESPN doesn't have a history of shoddy behavior.
It wasn't a defense of ESPN.
Oof, not for me. Deadspin coming out against plagiarism has me rethinking my stance on plagiarism. Maybe that Stephen Glass guy wasn't so bad after all.
Oof, not for me. Deadspin coming out against plagiarism has me rethinking my stance on plagiarism. Maybe that Stephen Glass guy wasn't so bad after all.
Deadspin vs. ESPN is the sports media version of the hypothetical game between the Yankees and Al-Qaeda.
They've also done that.
Why is there a Mike Piazza quote in the middle of that excerpt?
Yes, they really bolstered their case that ESPN paid a writer who lifted things from Wikipedia by calling them out on an unrelated inaccuracy about personal lives.
"Well, that's quite a trick. You try that sometime."
It's exactly the same thing - Wikipedia doesn't write itself.
ESPN writer Lynn Hoppes plagiarized a bunch of stuff, and when he got caught, ESPN totally ignored the situation.
ESPN VP John Walsh gave a lecture and Q&A at the University of Maryland. One of the students asked him about the Hoppes thing, and in response Walsh said that the situation had been resolved (which it hadn't) and that the Deadspin writer (who is gay, apparently) who first uncovered the story was only pushing it because the Deadspin writer and Hoppes were involved in a personal romantic dispute over a woman.
ESPN is one of the leading sports media entities in the world, and they're majority owned by the same company that owns ABC, one of the largest news media entities in the world, among other things. The fact that their initial response to documented plagiarism is to ignore it, and then to make up personal attacks against those who exposed it, is worth caring about.
Oof, not for me. Deadspin coming out against plagiarism has me rethinking my stance on plagiarism. Maybe that Stephen Glass guy wasn't so bad after all.
Stephen Glass was caught making up stories at The New Republic (and other publications). You're probably thinking of Jayson Blair, who was caught plagiarizing at the New York Times.
No kidding. I can't even feign enough interest to parse it out. Hell, Mitch Albom made up stuff that never happened and printed it in an actual fish wrap and was given a slap on the wrist at most.
Some 3rd rate ESPN.com writer plagarising Wikipedia (oh the horror plagiarizing an open dictionary!) doesn't even rate.
The flipside is that ESPN is a huge organization I can hardly get my outrage meter spiked that one of their thousands of writers plagiarized Wikipedia. If Chris Berman publishes a book and half the passages are lifted from a 1988 copy of the Baseball Abstract get back to me.
People spent time writing all that stuff, in the understanding that people who wanted to copy it would give them appropriate credit, and he broke that contract (and violated the site license) by stealing their work and passing it off as his own. Just because it's "free" doesn't mean that it's any less despicable for a writer to do that. Stealing is stealing.
It's actually two separate issues in one - the initial theft by the writer, and then the decision by management to do nothing to address the situation for months, after it was repeatedly called to their attention.
To me, the only real concerning thing is the denials. But on a scale of 1-10 of concern, where 1 is I'm running low on milk, this is a .085.
Regardless, if true (this is not exactly a well-documented story), that's a weird way to respond to a charge of plagiarism. The proper response would be "Hoppes didn't plagiarise" or "we have investigated and ..." or "we are investigating ..." If you then want to add "this appears to be a personal vendetta..." or some such, go ahead.
Damn you with your fact-checking! You're right, though. I was thinking of Glass because the movie about that situation was surprisingly solid. The only problem is that Peter Sarsgaard played Charles Lane, and this causes confusion for me because I like Sarsgaard, so I frequently forget that I dislike Charles Lane until I read him. Oooh, a Charles Lane column! Oh wait, he's the worst.
That's part of why it's a story - at the college event, Walsh said that the articles had all been taken down, but at that point, they hadn't been. From the article:
"So then I said, 'Putting that aside, what about [the Hoppes plagiarism examples]?'" Sanchez said. "[Walsh] said that they had scrapped all the articles that found to be plagiarized."
Not true. The stories had not been updated. When he talked to me, Walsh claimed he hadn't said that.
Just because it's not particularly interesting or stylistically distinct writing doesn't mean that he's entitled to take credit for it. It's still someone else's work.
That is not the only alternative - he could also attribute the quote to Wikipedia. And frankly, if all he's doing is rephrasing something from Wikipedia, he should probably cite them anyway, even if he's not lifting a direct quote.
It's actually two separate issues in one - the initial theft by the writer, and then the decision by management to do nothing to address the situation for months, after it was repeatedly called to their attention.
This.
Yes. For a B-level cast and (what could have been) a very dull topic (fake stories in a magazine I've never heard of), I was VERY surprised to like this movie as much as I did. I only watched it because it was the only (non-romantic) movie left on the shelves at the local video store when my wife sent me out to get "something to watch".
(Remember those days? Going to the video store? It seems so quaint now.)
I dunno. How many different ways are there to say "Mike Piazza played in the major leagues from 1992 to 2007"? Do we need to start referencing b-r for every stat? Should I be citing b-r and AROM every time I use bWAR? I feel pretty guilty for plagiarizing McCoy in all my "Alfonso Soriano is available" posts.
I didn't follow the Hoopes thing and I assume what he did was worse than this but there's got to be a certain amount of "fair use" when it comes to boilerplate factual stuff.
Or, here's Wiki on ARod:
"Rodriguez was drafted first overall by the Seattle Mariners in 1993."
Where's their cite?
"He was signed by Roger Jongewaard right out of high school."
Now, c'mon, the writer found that little factoid somewhere. (Why it's relevant is beyond me).
Yet ...
"Rodriguez then split most of 1995 between the Mariners and their AAA club, the Tacoma Rainiers.[9]"
That is sourced.
I root for Al-Qaeda any time they go up against New York. Which is the Al-Qaeada analogue, Deadspin or ESPN?
Umm... maybe could have been phrased better?
Yeah, for some reason we're a little sensitive about that sort of thing in this metro region.
What an assh0le.
QFT
Deadspin weakened its case, IMO, by citing instances where Hoppes had apparently done some rewriting on a few Wikipedia articles. There were plenty of examples in which he had obviously cut and pasted full paragraphs - including keeping Wikipedia's typos. By including the paraphrased stuff, it gives Hoppes and ESPN an opportunity to say, as Walt says, that there just aren't that many ways to write this simple factual information.
What I don't understand is why ESPN decided it was worth it to keep this guy around, ethical issues aside. I'd never heard of Lynn Hoppes till yesterday, so maybe he brings something more to the table, but there's no particular value in having a writer who simply cut-and-pastes articles from the Internet.
Darn, I guess I'm stuck in IT until I get a new Plan B.
Whether a writer needs to cite every fact obviously depends on the format. Academic articles are different from popular science writing which is different from news writing.
As for wikipedia, their goal is to be as true and accurate as possible while being open. Citations are absolutely necessary for these goals and citing the most basis facts is the basis of it. That being said, it doesn't always happen, which explains the inconsistency in your examples from A-Rod's page.
Even if it was true, it was a dick move to bring it up. If it wasn't true, then the guy is a liar, or someone who can't keep his facts straight -- neither of which, of course, disqualifies him from a high position at the World Wide Leader in Sports.
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