Blog

The Josephine Ulrick Literature and Poetry prizes offer an eye-popping $20,000 to the winner in each category. Now in its tenth year, this is the first time the twenty grand prize pool has been awa...  >

Elsewhere
Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do >

Other

< Back to Blog
0 Comments

Holding up the mirror: Windschuttle, me, and the provocateur on trial

June 11

The hoaxing of Quadrant editor Keith Windschuttle earlier this year is probably now a familiar story. Katherine Wilson, under the alias Sharon Gould (a ‘biotechnologist’ from Brisbane), submitted a scientific essay to Quadrant defending the use of human genes in food crops. Despite being largely fabricated and including a long list of forged footnotes as well as a fake author website, Windschuttle accepted the piece for publication in the Summer issue, thus failing to stand by the standards of rigorous fact-checking and authenticity that he had so often championed.

In the latest edition of Meanjin, Wilson writes on the story behind this hoaxing, as well as the ramifications for her and for Quadrant when it was made public. Wilson was recently interviewed about this on RRR and you can read the full article on our editions page. Here’s a short excerpt:

Among his other adventures, Windschuttle has made a hobby of condemning constructivist approaches to science and journalism. So posing as ‘Sharon Gould’, a Brisbane-based biotechnologist, I’d concocted an experiment to see whether he’d measure up to his ‘realist’ approach to truth (the rationale can be found online in Diary of a Hoax). ‘Gould’ submitted an essay that journalist Margaret Simons would later report as ‘studded with false science, logical leaps, outrageous claims and a mixture of genuine and bogus footnotes’.

Incredibly, Windschuttle’s acceptance of the essay, for the January–February 2009 issue of Quadrant, would soon dominate the front pages of every broadsheet in the nation. Poor Mr Windschuttle, who’d condemned academics for sloppy footnotes, had failed to make even the most elementary check of Gould’s putative credentials. Even the webpage I’d devised for her and sent him hadn’t received one hit, and Quadrant had overlooked the outrageous claims and logical flaws in the essay. I like to think Windschuttle’s reckless editing rescued Mayor Doyle from my mischief. Who knows.

An obvious choice to break the story was Margaret Simons, who has had her own adventures with culture warriors. Simons doesn’t share my approach to writing, but is in many ways my latter-day Mr Doyle. She’s quick-witted, kind and has a formidable intellect. I’d gotten to know her years ago, when I asked her to supervise my thesis on the blurred edges between advocacy and journalism. In Australia, advocacy and journalism mix like oil and water. Few media here publish in the French tradition of journalisme engage, or the American tradition of ‘advocacy journalism’, which is evidence-based but sets out to promote a specific viewpoint. With some notable exceptions, it’s not a style embraced in Australia—because, depending how you look at it, ‘advocacy journalism’ is either an oxymoron or a redundant phrase. It raises sticky questions about bias and balance.

Which is partly why a hoax seemed a fitting vehicle for my concerns. As an activist, or an advocate, I was troubled by the twin notions of ‘objectivity’ and ‘balance’ as they’re understood by some, because they can favour (already overrepresented) official truths and further marginalise already marginalised voices. They can normalise some positions at the expense of others, and they can erroneously imply a middle-ground of truth. They can enact political agendas simply by reporting them. Two obvious science examples are the intelligent design and climate change ‘debates’, in which some media gave equal time to unequally substantiated claims.


 

Our Friends


 

Only the comment field is required. Omitting the ID fields increases your risk of being mistaken for spam.