BBG Watch Commentary
Number seven news item in the Voice of America (VOA) English website’s top world news lineup for Monday afternoon, January 6, 2014, is a VOA News report on ancient Romans eating giraffe meat.
The VOA report has been plagiarized, in large parts word-for-word, from a University of Cincinnati news article, without attributing it clearly to the source or crediting the original author by name, although VOA provided a link.
How this by now non-news event — the original article was published four days earlier (January 2) and the conference at which a scientific paper about giraffe eating Romans and their diet was presented reportedly occurred two days ago (January 4) — made it into VOA’s top nine world news items on January 6 — right after “Record Cold Sweeps US” and even before “US Vessel to Assist Trapped Ships in Antarctica” and “‘Jihad Jane’ Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison” — appears to be yet another example of steeply declining journalistic standards and general mismanagement at the U.S. taxpayer-funded Voice of America.
Some news outlets in the U.S. and abroad reported on the University of Cincinnati scientific research on Roman diets, but they did it a few days earlier, soon after the results were presented to the media. No media outlet except VOA treated it as a top world news story.
LiveScience website reported the same news three days before VOA. LiveScience did not credit the original source, but it was a shorter piece that did not excerpt extensively from the University of Cincinnati article except for short quotes from a professor. USA TODAY – Newser posted a short news item on the same story a day before VOA. Newser is a USA TODAY content partner providing general news, commentary and coverage from around the Web. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY. The report was not anywhere near USA TODAY‘s top news.
UK’s tabloid Daily Mail also had a report on this story, but it had published it three days before VOA posted its report. Daily Mail had its report online its science section, not as one of the top general news on the home page.
Voice of America has apparently news posting standards that have fallen well below those of a British middle-market tabloid newspaper. Daily Mail also did not reveal where it got its information, but the article had much more original text than VOA’s article. It was not a cut-and-paste job as the VOA report was. The Daily Mail article was also far better written in a more readable style than the VOA News report. Daily Mail also included six photos from various sources.
Other news outlets that also failed to give proper credit to the original source, at least posted their news stories two or three days before VOA and did not cut-and-pasted word-for-word. None, as far as we could check, tried to present it as one of the day’s top news.
Some critics suggest that top VOA executives, VOA Director David Ensor and VOA Executive Editor Steve Redisch, have been trying to apply the British Daily Mail middle-market model to the Voice of America to increase web traffic.
The VOA English website posted 27 separate news reports on the British royal wedding in 2011 and five separate reports on the British royal baby christening in October 2013.
Few of these reports got more than a few dozen Facebook “Likes.” Several hours after posting, the VOA report on ancient Romans eating giraffe meat was showing only 15 Facebook “Likes.”
Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines “News” as “a report of recent events” and “previously unknown information.” The information was released and publicized a few days earlier and hardly qualifies as top world news. Plagiarism is defined as “the act of using another person’s words or ideas without giving credit to that person.”
While the information about ancient Roman diets itself was interesting, no major international news organization would report it as one of its top world news — certainly not several days later after such information had been released already to the media. BBC did not report on the story.
An online plagiarism checker easily detected unoriginal text in the VOA report, as well as poor grammar.
VOA News was not exactly trying to hide the source of the information and even provided a link where online visitors could find the original article, large parts of which VOA copied. The article, its title and its author were, however, not identified in the VOA link, which was simply “University of Cincinnati.”
While the VOA report itself used extensive cut-and-paste quotes from a news article by Dawn Fuller posted on the University of Cincinnati website on January 2, it did not mention within the VOA text her name as the author and as the primary source of the quotes in the VOA News report.
Visitors to the VOA English website could have assumed that VOA spoke directly to a quoted archeologist, Steven Ellis, a University of Cincinnati associate professor of classics, or listened to his scientific presentation. It appears, however, that VOA News never spoke to Professor Ellis. It also appears that a VOA reporter did not attend a scientific conference in Chicago where Professor Ellis was scheduled to give a paper.
While VOA report did not suggest that a VOA reporter spoke with Professor Ellis or attended the conference, some readers could assume that VOA put an extra reporting effort into this story when in fact VOA News simply took parts of somebody else’s work and presented them as its own. VOA’s only attempt at attribution was to provide a vaguely named link.
Dawn Fuller is a University of Cincinnati Public Information Officer and probably does not mind too much that her article was picked up by VOA without her being given full credit and her name being mentioned.
Professor Ellis who in 2012 won Prestigious Rome Prize for his research, may also not mind that he was quoted in a VOA News report, but he may mind that international audiences could have been mislead into thinking that he gave an interview to VOA. University professors are usually sensitive about plagiarism.
VOA News copied large quotes from Dawn Fuller’s article and pasted them into its report without any indication where they originally came from, unless a visitor to the VOA website clicked on a link and found out by reading the original article:
“That the bone represents the height of exotic food is underscored by the fact that this is thought to be the only giraffe bone ever recorded from an archaeological excavation in Roman Italy,” said Steven Ellis, a University of Cincinnati associate professor of classics. “How part of the animal, butchered, came to be a kitchen scrap in a seemingly standard Pompeian restaurant not only speaks to long-distance trade in exotic and wild animals, but also something of the richness, variety and range of a non-elite diet.”
“The ultimate aim of our research is to reveal the structural and social relationships over time between working-class Pompeian households, as well as to determine the role that sub-elites played in the shaping of the city, and to register their response to city-and Mediterranean-wide historical, political and economic developments. However, one of the larger datasets and themes of our research has been diet and the infrastructure of food consumption and food ways,” says Ellis.
He adds that as a result of the discoveries, “The traditional vision of some mass of hapless lemmings – scrounging for whatever they can pinch from the side of a street, or huddled around a bowl of gruel – needs to be replaced by a higher fare and standard of living, at least for the urbanites in Pompeii.”
Some of the other parts of the VOA News report were paraphrased from Dawn Fuller’s news article, “No Scrounging for Scraps: UC Research Uncovers the Diets of the Middle and Lower Class in Pompeii,” Dawn Fuller, UC Magazine (online), January 2, 2014.
For example, Dawn Fuller wrote: “UC teams of archaeologists have spent more than a decade at two city blocks within a non-elite district in the Roman city of Pompeii, which was buried under a volcano in 79 AD.”
VOA News wrote: “Archeologists from the University of Cincinnati spent more than a decade looking at two city blocks within a non-elite area of the city, which was buried lava and volcanic ash after Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.”
Dawn Fuller wrote: “Findings revealed foods that would have been inexpensive and widely available, such as grains, fruits, nuts, olives, lentils, local fish and chicken eggs, as well as minimal cuts of more expensive meat and salted fish from Spain. Waste from neighboring drains would also turn up less of a variety of foods, revealing a socioeconomic distinction between neighbors.
A drain from a central property revealed a richer variety of foods as well as imports from outside Italy, such as shellfish, sea urchin and even delicacies including the butchered leg joint of a giraffe.”
VOA News wrote: Findings revealed foods that would have been inexpensive and widely available, such as grains, fruits, nuts, olives, lentils, local fish and chicken eggs, as well as minimal cuts of more expensive meat and salted fish from Spain. Waste from neighboring drains also turned up a less diverse variety of foods, revealing socioeconomic differences between neighbors.
A drain from a central property revealed a richer variety of foods as well as imports from outside Italy, such as shellfish, sea urchin and even delicacies including the butchered leg joint of a giraffe.
Even though VOA News copied these sentences word-for-word from Dawn Fuller’s article, it did not use quotation marks and did not give credit to the author.
The VOA Journalistic Code says under Sourcing:
“VOA news and programming must be rigorously sourced and verified. VOA normally requires a minimum of two independent (non-VOA) sources before any newswriter, background writer, political affairs writer, correspondent, or stringer may broadcast information as fact in any language.”
We assume this means giving clear attribution to the source of any information provided on the VOA website. Did anyone at VOA call the University of Cincinnati? But verification, lack of attribution, and plagiarism are not the main issues — treating a three-days-old science news report as one of the day’s top news stories — is.
Even though VOA executives tout their commitment to multimedia and audience engagement, this particular VOA News report, like many others, appears to have been written quickly, was poorly edited — if it was edited at all — and did not include multiple other images and a video which are available from the University of Cincinnati website about this topic.
Video Available from University of Cincinnati But Not Used By VOA
Link to UC video on YouTube.
VOA News not using this video and other multimedia materials is not, however, the main problem.
What is inexcusable is that the VOA News report was posted three or fours days too late to be considered news, at yet it was presented on the VOA English website as a major news development of the day.
VOA executives have decimated the VOA Central Newsroom. Many veteran editors and writers have left expressing frustration with senior management. The agency now uses a large number underpaid, exploited and sometimes untrained outside contractors to do substantive reporting and editing. Some may not know VOA’s journalistic rules, which are stricter than at most commercial media outlets in the U.S.
We do not know who wrote this report — whether it was a staff writer or a contractor — and who made a decision to put it in the top news lineup. Whoever it was, they are victims of the dysfunctional management culture.
No one is saying that top VOA executives were directly involved in this mishap, but the ultimate responsibility for such a tremendous and sad decline of journalistic and managerial standards at this once proud journalistic organization clearly falls on the shoulders of its top leaders — VOA Director David Ensor and VOA Executive Editor Steve Redisch.
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VOA News Report — Number Seven Headline Link In Top Homepage News Lineup — As SEEN IN ITS FULL VERSION AT 4:39PM ET, DEC. 6, 2014
Ancient Romans Had a Complex Diet, Including Giraffe – Voice of America News
VOA News
January 06, 2014
The middle and lower classes of the Roman city of Pompeii had a surprisingly rich and varied diet, including such exotic fare as giraffe, according to newly published research.
Archeologists from the University of Cincinnati spent more than a decade looking at two city blocks within a non-elite area of the city, which was buried lava and volcanic ash after Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.
The area covers 10 separate building plots and a total of 20 shop fronts, most of which served food and drink. The waste that was examined included collections from drains as well as 10 latrines and cesspits, which yielded mineralized and charred food waste coming from kitchens and excrement. Among the discoveries in the drains was an abundance of the remains of fully-processed foods, especially grains.
Findings revealed foods that would have been inexpensive and widely available, such as grains, fruits, nuts, olives, lentils, local fish and chicken eggs, as well as minimal cuts of more expensive meat and salted fish from Spain. Waste from neighboring drains also turned up a less diverse variety of foods, revealing socioeconomic differences between neighbors.
A drain from a central property revealed a richer variety of foods, as well as imports from outside Italy, such as shellfish, sea urchin and even delicacies like the butchered leg joint of a giraffe.
“That the bone represents the height of exotic food is underscored by the fact that this is thought to be the only giraffe bone ever recorded from an archaeological excavation in Roman Italy,” said Steven Ellis, a University of Cincinnati associate professor of classics. “How part of the animal, butchered, came to be a kitchen scrap in a seemingly standard Pompeian restaurant not only speaks to long-distance trade in exotic and wild animals, but also something of the richness, variety and range of a non-elite diet.”
Deposits also included exotic and imported spices, some from as far away as Indonesia.
“The ultimate aim of our research is to reveal the structural and social relationships over time between working-class Pompeian households, as well as to determine the role that sub-elites played in the shaping of the city, and to register their response to city-and Mediterranean-wide historical, political and economic developments. However, one of the larger datasets and themes of our research has been diet and the infrastructure of food consumption and food ways,” says Ellis.
He adds that as a result of the discoveries, “The traditional vision of some mass of hapless lemmings – scrounging for whatever they can pinch from the side of a street, or huddled around a bowl of gruel – needs to be replaced by a higher fare and standard of living, at least for the urbanites in Pompeii.”
The archeologists presented their discoveries on January 4 at the joint annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America and American Philological Association in Chicago.