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Science Mag's Scoop Follows Tribesmen's $10 million Libel Lawsuit: ASRL's StinkyJournalism.org Responds to Exclusive Interviews With Author Jared Diamond and New Yorker Editor, David Remnick in New Series of Blog Posts

Posted on: Tuesday, 19 May 2009, 06:00 CDT

NEW YORK, May 19 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- This week it was dropped like a bomb on the scientific community when the venerable magazine Science contained a lead news article (in the May 15, 2009 issue) by reporter Michael Balter, "'Vengeance' Bites Back At Jared Diamond" that included the first public comments by Pulitzer Prize winning scientist, Jared Diamond and New Yorker editor David Remnick regarding the 10 million dollar libel lawsuit filed against Diamond and Advance Publications, owner of the New Yorker, in New York State Court, April 20, 2009.

Michael Balter wrote on his blog "On 20 April, Diamond, 71, was sued in the Supreme Court of the State of New York for allegedly defaming both Daniel Wemp and Isum Mandingo, the alleged target of Wemp's revenge war" in Diamond's now infamous April 21, 2008, New Yorker essay "Annals of Anthropology: Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even?"

Balter continued: "The lawsuit... demands at least $10 million in damages. It follows a year long investigation led by Rhonda Roland Shearer, an artist and the widow of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould."

Art Science Research Laboratory's media ethics project, StinkyJournalism.org, that did the original investigation and first reported on the lawsuit, is now taking Science's interviews with Diamond and Remnick and responding in a series of blog posts, which includes this first one by Shearer.

Shearer's first blog post in the StinkyJournalism.org series addresses Balter's statement that, "Diamond insists that he followed good journalistic practice" while writing his revenge tale that relied on only one source, his Papua New Guinean driver, Daniel Wemp. Wemp said Diamond's facts are wrong. Diamond admits to Science, that Wemp had no idea that he would be featured in The New Yorker and that no fact checker contacted Wemp, or the other indigenous people also falsely identified as criminals, before publication.

Shearer writes, "The sad truth is, however, using one source to detail the unpublished history of Papua New Guinea tribal warfare when your source is not a historian but your paid employee/driver, is hardly 'good practice' for a UCLA freshman, let alone a UCLA full professor and scientist with multiple awards."

Michael Balter wrote: "The lawsuit has received very little news coverage until now, possibly because both Diamond and the New Yorker had refused to comment. Our story features their first on the record comments, and is an attempt to be scrupulously fair to both sides of the issue while digging beneath the surface of the affair for its deeper meaning, both journalistically and anthropologically."

Both Diamond and Remnick told Science they stand by the story "Vengeance is Ours," even while Balter's reportage picks apart their arguments. Balter's article offers an objective and detailed account of the events that led to the lawsuit and StinkyJournalism.org's determination to keep the disturbing issues raised by Diamond and The New Yorker about journalistic and scientific ethics alive.

It should be noted that Science magazine is one of the most respected in the world. According to the magazine's web site, "Founded in 1880 on $10,000 of seed money from the American inventor Thomas Edison, Science has grown to become the world's leading outlet for scientific news, commentary, and cutting-edge research, with the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general-science journal. Through its print and online incarnations, Science reaches an estimated worldwide readership of more than one million. In content, too, the journal is truly international in scope; some 35 to 40 percent of the corresponding authors on its papers are based outside the United States. Its articles consistently rank among world's most cited research."

Any attempts by Diamond and The New Yorker to downplay or ignore this controversy are officially ended by this devastating article in Science.

Art Science Research Laboratory, www.asrlab.org, a not-for-profit, co-founded by Shearer and her late husband, Harvard Professor Stephen Jay Gould, has a non-partisan journalism ethics program in which students work with professional researchers to promote the media's use of scientific methods and experts before publication. They also publish investigations of factual errors and ethical breaches by media outlets, www.StinkyJournalism.org . Alexa lists StinkyJournalism.org as 15th among most visited media watchdogs. (In context, American Journalism Review [AJR.org] is 18th on list.)

SOURCE Art Science Research Laboratory

Source: PR Newswire

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