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Art Science Research Laboratory's StinkyJournalism.org Releases Report: Expert Linguist Concludes New Yorker Quotations Attributed to New Guinea Tribesman Are Likely Fabrications Written by Jared Diamond

Posted on: Tuesday, 2 June 2009, 05:00 CDT

Dr. Douglas's full report is made public today in an essay, the seventh in a series, titled, "The Pig in a Garden"

NEW YORK, June 2 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Fabricated quotes in The New Yorker? That, at least, is the conclusion of a new report by the esteemed linguist Douglas Biber, whose research that appeared in the venerable magazine, has raised questions about the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond.

At the request of ASRL's StinkyJournalism.org, Dr. Biber conducted an analysis of Diamond's April 21, 2008 article, "Annals of Anthropology: Vengeance is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even?"

In his report, Dr. Biber focused on the quotes attributed to Daniel Wemp, a Papua New Guinea citizen who drove Diamond as a World Wildlife Fund employee, 2001-2002, and whom Diamond uses as his only quoted source in "Vengeance is ours." It is because of the allegedly fabricated quotes used in The New Yorker story that Wemp, along with another named citizen of Papua New Guinea (PNG), Isum Mandingo, have filed a $10 million defamation lawsuit against Diamond and The New Yorker in the New York Supreme Court.

Dr. Biber's linguistic analysis of the article shows that the Diamond quotes (that is, the language attributed to Daniel Wemp in the New Yorker article) are not typically used in normal human speech. Rather, these claimed quotes contain numerous grammatical constructions that are common in formal academic writing but very rarely used in normal speech. Dr. Biber concluded that "it is extremely unlikely that the New Yorker quotations are accurate verbatim representations of language that originated in speech." To put it more simply: People don't talk the way Diamond had them talking.

Biber's essay, "Did Daniel Wemp really say that? Using corpus linguistics to evaluate the likelihood that Jared Diamond's reported quotes in The New Yorker were ever spoken," is the seventh in the "The Pig in a Garden" series, edited by Rhonda Roland Shearer, Sam Eifling and Alan Bisbort, that addresses the allegations made against Diamond and The New Yorker and the issues raised, from the perspective of several different disciplines. The series features commentaries by scientists, environmentalists, linguists, journalists and media ethics experts who have reviewed the evidence against Diamond and the New Yorker amassed by StinkyJournalism.org and conclude the PNG tribesmen Wemp and Isum are falsely accused of crimes.

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-19th among most visited media watchdogs. (In context, American Journalism Review vacillates between 14th-18th on list.)

SOURCE Art Science Research Laboratory

Source: PR Newswire

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