Churnalism

There's a rather amusing and potentially somewhat disruptive new web site called churnalism.com, which allows users to detect instances of churnalism.  I spent an entertaining few hours trying it out, and the results are indeed revealing.

I've been vaguely aware of the phenomena of churnalism, where some journalists copy and paste press releases from companies or institutions in a more or less verbatim manner and then issue it as a news article without citation in a way which appears to be their own work, but I had no idea how widespread this was or what amount of copying occurs.  What I found was that churnalism is widespread and very easy to locate, even amongst the most reputable news sources such as the BBC and the more "serious" newspapers.  Some "news" articles are more than 90% copy and pasted from an original press release without any sort of warning or disclaimer that this is actually the public relations viewpoint of a particular company rather than the more independent writing of a journalist.

The method for detecting churnalism is quite simple.  Think of any well known UK company or institution then go to their web site.  They usually have a "media" or "press" button somewhere on the site, which then typically links to recent press releases.  Copy and paste the text, and see if any news article matches are found.

It's quite enlightening really, because this indicates in a compelling way that when you're reading a newspaper or a news site what you're actually reading may often be 50% or more public relations spin-doctoring.  I already knew that newspapers tend to be biased in various ways, but I hadn't realised that in some cases the articles aren't just biased, they're completely captured, literally and directly acting as a mouthpiece for certain interest groups.

This is likely to be a disruptive moment for journalism, because they're either going to need to add disclaimers or citations to some of their stories - in which case the degree of capture is going to become far more obvious to the reader - or they may choose to clean up their act in order to avoid losing credibility.  Ignoring sites like churnalism.com, and hoping that nobody visits them isn't going to be a viable strategy because it's quite common now for news stories to have comments sections, and it only takes one commenter to post a link to the relevant churnalism analysis for the journalist (or churnalist) to be rumbled as a plagiarist.

Jimmy Wales also has an article about PlagiPedia.  Presently this seems to be more of an idea than a web site, but crowdsourcing plagiarism detection in a manner similar to Wikipedia seems like it would be feasible to do.  It probably would also be possible to automate this process to a significant extent.  A German politician has already been forced to resign as a result of wiki based plagiarism detection, and you have to wonder whether there are any other politicians who obtained PhDs via the same kind of deception.  Did David Cameron or Nick Clegg, or any other front bench politicians, write PhD theses during their university education?  Is it common for people to obtain higher education qualifications via plagiarism? I hope not, but as far as I know not much analysis of this kind has been done.

Hopefully all of the above should lead in a positive direction towards greater honesty and integrity, or at least to it being more common for original sources of writing to be cited to their proper authors.