{"id":14540,"date":"2013-09-23T10:00:15","date_gmt":"2013-09-23T14:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=14540"},"modified":"2013-09-23T10:12:12","modified_gmt":"2013-09-23T14:12:12","slug":"ap-freelancer-says-report-of-rebel-chemical-weapons-use-not-hers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2013\/09\/23\/ap-freelancer-says-report-of-rebel-chemical-weapons-use-not-hers\/","title":{"rendered":"AP freelancer says report of rebel chemical weapons use not hers"},"content":{"rendered":"

McClatchy<\/em> has the article AP freelancer says report of rebel chemical weapons use not hers<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Gavlak produced a series of emails detailing her unsuccessful attempt to have Mint News either clarify the article\u2019s background or remove it from the site. The emails begin almost immediately after publication of the story on Aug. 29th and continued through the weekend until Sept. 2.<\/p>\n

The initial email detailing the filing of the story \u2013 Gavlak admits to helping Ababneh convert his Arabic reporting into English \u2013 reads \u201cPls find the Syria story I mentioned uploaded on Google Docs. This should go under Yahya Ababneh\u2019s byline. I helped him write up his story but he should get all the credit for this.\u201d<\/p>\n

After seeing the story published under her name and the amount of interest it was generating \u2013 in large part because of the credibility lent to it by her relationship with AP, which bills itself as the \u201cworld\u2019s oldest and largest newsgathering organization\u201d \u2013 Gavlak demanded her name be removed. Muhawesh refused.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You have to read the whole story to come away pretty confused about what is going on here.\u00a0 Let me see if I can confuse you more by tacking on this other story that I just read from McClacthy<\/em>, Russia says US is trying to derail Syria deal<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Our U.S. partners are beginning to blackmail us,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview with the First Channel, a state-owned television network. He said the U.S. was threatening to “fold up the work” toward securing the chemical weapons if Russia won’t back a United Nations Security Council resolution based on Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, which allows the use of force against nations that threaten international peace.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps we just won’t take yes\u00a0 for an answer to our desire to get international controls on Syria’s chemical weapons.<\/p>\n

It seems like it just goes with the territory that when you are in a powerful position of authority, you cannot let everyday honesty be the rule.\u00a0 The matters are such high stakes, that you may just need to twist the truth, if not outright lie, in order to keep the world or your country safe.\u00a0 The trouble with this way of thinking is that when you need people to take your word for something, you have lost all credibility, and nobody is going to take anybody’s word as definitive proof of anything.<\/p>\n

\n

Perhaps I should relate my own experience with gratuitous inclusion of your name in a byline.<\/p>\n

In 1983, a group of us at Digital Equipment Corp. decided to write some technical papers on some software that we had written the year before. Since I was visiting the Universtiy of California at Berkeley for a year, I was not in on all the decision making as to who would write which articles about the software. I had made an emailed suggestion that did not include my name on one of the articles. I guess as a favor to me, my name was included on the article, anyway.<\/p>\n

The trouble was, that the article was accepted for presentation at a technical conference based on an outline. A description of the article was published in the program of the conference, but the person who was responsible for the article never wrote it, never informed the organizers of the conference that he was not going to write the article, and did not attend the conference.<\/p>\n

Since I was well known by a number of the attendees and organizers of the conference, it fell upon me to explain why “my” article had never been submitted and that nobody was going to present the talk at the conference.<\/p>\n

You can see what a favor my “coauthors” did for me by giving me credit that I did not want. They didn’t even get my name correct on the byline. They used my nickname instead of my full name.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

McClatchy has the article AP freelancer says report of rebel chemical weapons use not hers. Gavlak produced a series of emails detailing her unsuccessful attempt to have Mint News either clarify the article\u2019s background or remove it from the site. The emails begin almost immediately after publication of the story on Aug. 29th and continued […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-14540","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14540"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14544,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14540\/revisions\/14544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}