Terry Cowgill

The Fund Kerfuffle Revisited

August 24, 2006 on 5:27 pm | In Main, Media |

Photo of John Fund courtesy OpinionJournal.com

Those who have been following this controversy are probably wondering why I hadn’t followed up yet with a response to a recent message from John Fund, who earlier this week lifted some of my material for his weekly column in Opinionjournal.com, The Wall Street Journal’s online opinion pages.

Well, I have been holding my fire in an attempt to give Fund the benefit of the doubt. I have read and enjoyed his column for years and I know that even the best of writers (including yours truly) can make mistakes.

The first posting on this matter is directly below this one, so if you need background, go there first. But suffice it to say that Fund’s response to my inquiry about using my material without attribution raises more questions than it answers.

The wording of Fund’s first message addressing my concerns is so vague as to be evasive. He says it is his fault but then suggests it was his editors who took out the attribution. Yet he is careful not to actually come out and say that.

He could have said simply that he had read my blog, liked some of my ideas, used them with attribution but later discovered the credit had been edited out. But he does not do that, opting instead to take nebulous claims of “responsibility” and assuring me that “nothing was done intentional.” Oh, yes, and he was traveling on Sunday, the day before his column ran, and was not paying careful attention to the edits.

But this is the most curious sentence of all:

I cannot say I would have made an adjustment, but I can assure you proper citation was made.

So let me get this straight: Fund is taking responsibility for not catching an editor’s mistake that he’s not even sure he would have corrected if given the chance? And what is “proper citation?” Again, he doesn’t say. Perhaps in his mind “proper citation” is no citation at all. Ergo, if an editor had saved his unedited, unsourced copy and later reviewed it, Fund could say he did not fib about what he considered “proper.”

And when I asked him for a clarification or editor’s note, he said he would “pass it onto the editors.” Needless to say, if he does that, he attracts more attention to this kerfuffle, so I am not holding my breath for a correction.

Then he gets clumsy with his wording:

Again I regret and apologize for not catching the omission.

Woops. In his first message he implies the editors took out the attribution. In the second, it was an “omission.” Omit means “to leave out; fail to include or mention, as in to omit a name from a list.” (source: dictionary.com; how’s that for citation?). The word “omission” would make sense if it were Fund who failed to cite my work, but not when used to characterize the work of editors who may have taken it out. And for the record, I have been in this business for almost seven years and have never heard of an editor taking out an attribution.

According to my stats counter, Fund did a vanity search on Technorati to find my column a few hours after my complaint to his employer was sent (I am assuming that’s how he found it when he visited my blog originally). I am told by people in-the-know that many journalists in the MSM do this to varying degrees. I myself look for broad ideas that way and use them as a springboard for my own pieces. Fund, however, took that method a step or two further.

I really don’t wish to make a federal case out of this. I like the WSJ and have great respect for the work of Paul Gigot, the editor of that paper’s editorial page and the man to whom Fund presumably reports. But an acknowledgment of the “omission” on OpinionJournal.com would go a long way toward setting the record straight. Right now, however, only Fund and his copy editors know the truth.