Op-ed pieces not written by their 'supposed' authors!

[bermudat]

www.chron.com-cs-CDA-ssistory.mpl-editorial-outlook-2558360.html

This current administration has made me very cynical, but I was not prepared for the following:

<snip>
The March 4 op-ed by Sheldon Landsberger, a University of Texas professor of nuclear engineering, argued trenchantly that the government is fleecing electric-power ratepayers, who for more than two decades have been contributing mandatory fees for the development of a proposed national nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Landsberger charged that a portion of the fees earmarked for the Nuclear Waste Fund is diverted to the U.S. Treasury. "Denying the Yucca Mountain project an adequate level of funding," he wrote, "is stealing money from taxpayers who were required to support the waste management project."

Strong words. Familiar ones, too. So familiar that I was sure they were entombed in the towering file of articles on nuclear waste that I, ahem, maintain. I knew I could excavate the words eventually. Or I could Google them. I typed in "Yucca Mountain" and "stealing money"; 0.11 seconds later, I had my cite: A Dec. 9, 2003, op-ed column in the State, the Columbia, S.C., daily. It appeared under the byline of Abdel E. Bayoumi, chairman of the department of mechanical engineering at the University of South Carolina. Wrote Prof. Bayoumi: "Denying the repository project an adequate amount of funding is essentially stealing money from the taxpayers who were required to support the waste management project."

Other sentences were identical, as was the entire last paragraph, but this was no case of garden-variety plagiarism; Landsberger had not appropriated the words of Bayoumi. Instead, as I was about to learn, Landsberger and other engineering professors at universities great and small had been sent op-eds over the past decade or more and asked to sign, seal and deliver them as their own to their local newspapers. The opinion pieces were written not by the academic experts, but originally by a PR agency in Washington, D.C., working on behalf of the nuclear energy industry.
<snip>

So the op-ed pieces that we read in newspapers are not necessarily written by the person whose name follows the word -by-?!? When I read an article by a full professor or professor emeritus, I give it more credence than some author from some noname think tank. Was anyone else aware of this practice of experts putting their names on op-ed pieces they did not write?

<snip>
The op-eds are ginned up by a prodigious copywriter at Potomac Communications Group named Peter Bernstein, who works out of an office in Alexandria, Va. Bernstein did not return several messages I left for him over a two-week period, but I did hear from his boss, Bill Perkins, a Potomac founding partner. Perkins told me it makes no difference whose byline is on an op-ed column; it's what the piece says that matters. "Whether the words are largely theirs, or largely not theirs, the views are. Nobody would submit an article if they didn't totally agree with it," he said.

I was upset to learn that the "by" in a scholar's byline may well be a ruse, a duplicitous means of inducing a lobby-authored, lobby-funded piece into print and onto the public agenda. And sure, I recognize that many politicians don't utter a word that a ghost didn't write and a focus group didn't approve, but academic rules require that scholars' research and writing be original. (And isn't that why PR firms recruit scholars to sign the op-eds -- precisely because of their status as independent experts?
<snip>

Damn! You can't believe what you read or what you see (thanks to photoshop). How can any of us know what is truly going on anymore?

[salin]

1. link doesn't work

sounds like the story is talking about the next level of astroturf.. not from citizen letters to the editor - but trumped up "experts." Same process but probably garners even more impact.

[amazona]

2. well-known people never write their own stuff

I am a writer and I'm sorry to say it has been that way for many years.

[salin]

3. Interesting...

studied under some folks who are top in their field internationally - when they write (ed policy) in papers (nyt, etc.) it is always their writing. Have seen it first hand, and read columns years later that use the same phrasing and constructs that would suggest that the authors cited in the paper are indeed the real authors.

This could vary by field, of course...

[salin]

4. wapo link

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38708-2004Apr24.html

[Sir Craig]

5. Al Franken mentioned something similar in his "Lies" book

Chapter 23, "I'm Prudenized"

Franken writes about an article supposedly written by John McCaslin of the Washington Times about his (Franken's) appearance at the White House Photographers Dinner, only to find out that the rather scurrilous remark made was written not by McCaslin, but by über-asshole Wes Pruden, executive editor at the Times, who apparently has a hell of a beef with liberals, but is too cowardly to put his own name on the article.

So why should we surprised by any of this?

[cap]

6. even when people don't write their own stuff

they usually have speech writers who write original stuff. They don't take copy from a PR agency representing someone with a known point of view.

[struggle4progress]

7. This sort of thing is sneered at by serious academics ...

and can do real damage to the reputations of people who cheat in this way.