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> What does upset me is a simple fact: No one contacted me about this. > Not Bello herself, not the staff at LitHub, not the journalist who wrote the Gawker pi
by eganist 4y ago
> What does upset me is a simple fact: No one contacted me about this.
> Not Bello herself, not the staff at LitHub, not the journalist who wrote the Gawker piece and not even any of the readers of that piece. While I clearly found it fine on my own, the fact that there has been zero outreach is, in a word, surprising.
Because few people care about the victim, and everyone seems to obsess over the perpetrator.
I don't know how well the far more severe crimes in our society map in this context, but at least with serial or spree killings, there's an effort to take attention away from the perpetrator due to media fixation on them and instead redirecting it towards healing the injuries (https://www.dontnamethem.org/ https://www.dontnamethem.org/). I don't think it's exactly 1 for 1, but I think the sociological mechanics are probably the same here:
If it's not local to the reader, the reader is more likely to be fascinated by the perpetrator rather than go out of their way to heal the injured, or learn from the happening in any tangible way.
- dannyobrien 4y agoIan Betteridge (of Betteridge's Law fame) once described this to me as "Journalists pick up the phone": which is to say, if you're claiming to be committing journalism, you call (or message) everyone that you're talking about -- for comment, for their side of the story, to correct or challenge your facts. It's pretty unpleasant and chastening a lot of the time, and you have to develop a hard skin for cold-calling and being blown off, or having people vent at you. But if you don't do it, you don't know all the angles, and you haven't finished your job.
- bin_bash 4y agoI was thinking today about George Floyd when there was a phenomenon of people calling Derek Chauvin's trial the "George Floyd trials". I wonder if the "Say His Name" protests actually caused that to happen since it was a rare case where we heard George Floyd's name so much he became the main character of that story in our minds.
- cafard 4y agoWell, I certainly don't remember the names of the officers tried in the beating of Rodney King: there were several of them.
- bin_bash 4y agoThat's a fair point, of course this was an extemporaneous thought—not a researched idea that I had.
- cafard 4y agoI think that in many cases the victim's name gets remembered. The Atlantic has an article in the current issue mentioning Medgar Evers. As it happens, I do remember the name of the man who shot Evers, was acquitted then and convicted thirty or forty years later. But I have to fish in my memory for it. I certainly don't remember the names of the Manson adherents who killed Sharon Tate, a bit later in the 1960s.
- zrobotics 4y agoA counterpoint though, I certainly remember the names of many of the American mass shooters and almost none of their victims.
- cafard 4y agoAny interesting point, though at the moment I can't get past Whitman, whose crime occurred almost 60 years ago. So is that one remembers the side with fewer names?
- yes_i_can 4y agoIt's something of a double-edged sword because, naturally, "George Floyd trials" made it sound like George Floyd was the person on trial.
- raunak 4y agoNot really honestly. I’m gonna make a honest guess and say no one really thought that, if you didn’t know what that trial was at that time, you genuinely had to have been living under a rock.
- cat_plus_plus 4y ago
- justinclift 4y agoWho are you meaning by "prior victims" there? Asking because George Floyd was the one killed in the above mentioned instance.
- eyelidlessness 4y agoI wonder why you’d think, even after a rare murder conviction of a cop, that the murder victim being the “main character” is odd. The trial isn’t the “story”, only its conclusion.
- burnished 4y agoThe parent comment is about media fixation on perpetrators. This was an event where that was reversed.
- eyelidlessness 4y agoGood. That was the goal. The whole point of saying the names of the victims is to center them in the telling of what happened to them.
- DANK_YACHT 4y agoSociety, as with other forms of cheating, is the real victim of plagiarism.
- infotecht 4y agoI have definitely noticed the perpetrator fixation; I always thought it was an attempt to respect the privacy of the families rather than obsession. But in this specific case -- and I'm not trying to be sarcastic here -- could the lack of contact to the victim be a result of there being no citation, instead? Not enough people knowing who the victim was, perhaps in combination with the bystander effect? I have no experience in the industry so I don't know if it'd be likely, but it seems plausible.
- throwanem 4y agoIn order to call it plagiarism in print without risk of libel, you have to be able to identify what was plagiarized. Unless it was published anonymously, that means you know from whom it was stolen.
- jjulius 4y agoIt's further interesting because Gawker went as far as to edit their original piece, at the end of it, to mention that he reached out to them to clarify that he wrote both pieces himself. They don't even include a link to his piece on Plagiarism Today about the issue, despite linking to LitHub's statement about the issue in a separate edit.
- ajb 4y agoTBH this is because the main victim of plagiarism is usually not the original author. The usual case is some student doing it to gain a qualification, and the victims are the people who trust that the qualification was obtained honestly and the other students who took the time to do honest work only to be out competed by someone more "productive". There, the person copied probably does not know or care. Here, where it's done in a published work, the original author can be aggrieved that they didn't get a citation (or in rare cases, royalties) but mostly it's the publisher and readers who are being let down. I guess the main case where there is a serious injury to the original author is where they were not famous and the plagiarist is, and the original author gets suspected of being the plagiarist
- collegeburner 4y agoI saw a meme the other day that joked that we'd have a lot less if we called them things like "The Small PP Killer". Probably true.