protecting a plagiarist

when mainstream media can and do ignore the scandalous plagiarism of a krip yuson, when he continues to write a column for the arts and culture section of philippine star, if he continues to write for rogue magazine, when he continues to shepherd aspiring writers in the dumaguete writing workshop, if he continues to teach creative writing in the ateneo, if he continues to be a presence in the palanca awards night, what does it say of our mainstream media, our academic institutions, and our literary culture?

at least in social media he has been exposed and excoriated, as he deserves to be, and gmanews online has fired him as editor-at-large.   i am sure it helped that no less than the center for media freedom and responsibility — executive director, melinda quintos de jesus; deputy director, luis teodoro; directors jose abueva, fr. joaquin bernas, fulgencio factoran, maribel ongpin, paulynn paredes-sicam, and vergel santos — jeered at yuson from its website for attempting to legitimize plagiarism.

so again i ask, what does it say of our mainstream media, our academic institutions, and our literary culture when a krip yuson is allowed to go on as if nothing happened?   as if plagiarism by a much-admired writer is forgivable.   microcosm of the macrocosm?   if danding cojuangco can get away with the coconut levy funds, if the marcoses can get away with plunder and human rights violations, if jocjoc bolante can get away with a fertilizer scam, if gma can get away with hello-garci and extrajudicial killings, if the aquinos can get away with hacienda luisita, if the supreme court can get away with partisanship and plagiarism, if the bishops can get away with lying about sex and reproduction, if angelo reyes can get away with suicide, why not krip yuson with plagiarism?

mainstream media and academics and the righteous showbiz burgis were so quick to jump on willie revillame for the janjan episode.   this renders their silence on krip yuson’s plagiarism and arrogance both deafening and shocking.   more so when one asks why kaya the silence, and the only answer seems to be that they are protecting their own kind, condoning their own sins, tell me if i’m wrong.   wonder no more what’s happening to our country.   they are all complicit in this damaged culture.

in the spirit of disclosure: krip and i were friends until we had a falling out over a personal matter many years ago.   i’ve since kept out of his way as he has kept out of mine.   so, if we were still friends, would i be saying all these in public?   given the way he has handled it, YES, and i would not have hesitated to scream at him to his face, or over the phone, for being so stupid as to think he was big enough to get away with it.   not in my book.   friend or no friend.

no, krip, this isn’t fun

it is hardly of any consequence that the usual lynch mob that marauds through social media is having such a fun time indulging in vituperation.

no one’s “having such a fun time“.   rather, it’s a sad sad sad state of affairs.

here’s a piece i solicited from a suki in my comment section, whose perspective on plagiarism i share.

FAILED INSTITUTIONS

It appears hubris has made another man mad.  Stuart Santiago is absolutely correct lumping the pang-masa Willie and the ur-conyo Krip Yuson in one post.  I am a writer myself and I pity the man for losing his grasp of reality.  Since I don’t really have one, I seldom use my name even as I flood the Interwebs with my thoughts, some of them pretty jarring if you’re one of those pedigreed types that compete yearly for best at Madison Square Garden.  Yuson, who has a name, is on the verge of losing it.  The first stage of grief is universal and we sympathize, but not to the point of selling out our future.

Perhaps it is only fitting that it was a real man who outed him. Yuson has this smell of alpha dog about him.  His first apologetic letter had the manly signature of admitting one’s mistake without really admitting it.

But let me give you my simple thoughts on the issue, based on fact and common sense.

Yuson edited the Joble piece for GMA News Online.  FACT.

Yuson wrote the Rogue magazine piece under his byline.  FACT.

Fact:  Jaemark called him out on April 6, calling his action plagiarism.

Fact:  Yuson replied, admitting he had “joined the list of perpetrators of plagiarism,” apologizing to “readers, as well as the entities involved” and predicting he “will beat my breast for a good long time, make that a long awful time.”

Now on his 2nd writeup on the matter, we have a man less contrite than he was a week prior… FUCK! Instead of being raked over coals, he says he “might just break wind” over the entire thing. Fuck!

It also appears he has taken back his former admission of committing plagiarism, calling it “alleged plagiarism,” as it seems that an “editor can lay claim to part ownership of written work, as has been argued about in the past.” FUCK!  And another FUCK:

“… in all truth, the quotation marks and initial attribution to Rey Joble and GMANews Online were dropped, intentionally by me as the marks made the chunk look so clunky. I thought I’d work the credits back in somehow, once I was about to finalize the submission for Rogue. That didn’t happen, and that’s my grievous fault.”

Now for some common sense questions:

DO you dear readers accept this excuse for leaving out proper attribution: quotation marks look so clunky?

DO you my fellow gullible indios believe for one second that a writer who had the good intention of properly attributing said passages would forget to inform his editor on his sprightly omission of quotation marks?

Please take your time. Then here are more questions:

DEAR members of the academe, do you for one second believe that an editor has a write to recycle a “chunk” of another man’s writing into his own piece without quotation marks or other but equally obvious marks that indicate the “chunk” isn’t from the byline?

DEAR Atenistas, do you for a single minute believe that Yuson, being editor, is automatically part-writer?  OK, never mind that.  Let’s say you believe he is part-writer of the Joble piece, placing a comma in the original Joble:

“He was regarded as the man responsible for the revival of the popularity of the Philippine Basketball Association.  It was under his watch when the pro league agreed to send the first-ever all-pro national men’s basketball team to the Asian Games and when the Asia’s pioneering pro league institutionalized the annual PBA All-Star Game.”

DO you all honestly think it is all right for him to recycle said piece?  Have you ever heard of the word “self-plagiarism”?  How about double-dipping?  Dove-tailing?

DEAR Rogue Editor.  Do you allow double-dipping?  Ok, let’s say you do since this is R.P.  Do you allow cross publication of a piece without crediting the first publisher?

DEAR Krip Yuson.  If indeed you intended to credit Joble for the passages, then why did you have to EDIT the piece – “The further ‘rewrites’ you cited were no attempt to paper or layer over the piece that appeared in GMAnews online, but simply efforts by me to make it read even better, or so I thought at the time.” Didn’t you already edit it on its first publication on GMA Online?  Did it sound too much like Joble?

Statement

I believe Yuson’s first crime is punishable by suspension from the institutions he is associated with.  His second and third crimes, the grave crimes of palusot, is punishable by expulsion.  Why are these latter crimes more serious?  Let me ask the faculty of Ateneo that.  Why is Yuson’s palusot a serious crime in academe?  To Philippine Star … what am I saying?   To GMA News Online … Are you seriously supporting Mr. Yuson?  Do you seriously think silence is a virtue, under any circumstances, in journalism?  To Krip’s friends…  I know you are no better than this guy, but do you honestly think he can get away with it?

To Stuart Santiago.  I hope your suggestion I write a post about it for your blog pays off.  We get satisfaction from explaining the obvious.  Such is life in this country.

BRIAN

the krip & willie show

i hear the kill-willie burgis elements are lying low.   i wonder why.   good, if it’s to rethink the issue of child abuse, which is different from willie abuse.   good, if it’s to take stock and see that if you don’t watch local tv, if you don’t watch willie, and all you could be bothered to take in was the spliced/edited youtube video, then you don’t have a right to make any kind of judgement, which should never be removed from the context of Filipino mass culture, no matter how baduy or kadiri-to-death to burgis sensitivities.   good, if the self-righteous burgis elements are beginning to realize that the kill-willie save-janjan noise is a lynch-mob show of power that could should be used to fix government, fix the economy, fix the environment, fix education.   they’re just not up to it?   television’s dreadfulness is merely a reflection of filipino society’s larger dreadfulness, and it’s unfair to single out willie when everybody else in corridors of power are being as dreadful, if in more subtle, sometimes unthinking, ways.

in academe, i see that the plagiarist’s friends are very quiet, simply incapable, it would seem, of drawing a line between right and wrong — the friendship, the utang na loob, the samahan, are just too important.   instead they draw a line between friends and not-friends.   values of honesty and integrity can go hang.

lem garcellano puts it quite graphically:

…para lang kasong jan-jan yan. di ka ka-tropa, luto ka sa sarili mong mantika. hindi nila masikmurang i-crispy pata si Krip. kasi isalang mo ang isa, lahat sasagitisit sa isang kawa. (parang pagluluto ng bulig sa Bulacan, buhay pa ibubuhos lahat sa kawa ng kumukulong mantika tapos sasakluban. maririnig mo yung kasag ng dahandahang pagkamatay).  *let’s see them fry their own kind*

nah, this doesnt look like a social media lynch mob that would have the guts to lynch its own kind; the other kind, yes.   halatang halata in the krip case, because of the silence, and in the willie case, because of the hysteria.

the silence must be because they agree with krip’s lame excuse that since he had edited the work of joble considerably, kanya na yon?  i wish he or joble would show us the original and the edited so we can see the truth of that.   but even so,  the fact that he allowed the article to be published only with joble’s byline only means that he as editor gave up all rights to the material.   he can’t eat his cake (binayaran siya as editor) and have it, too (kanya pa rin ang artikulo as co-author).

as for the willie hysteria,  here’s a treat from james cordova, he whose profile pic is a pic of macario sakay.   a series of irreverent fb jabs at some leaders of the lynch mob.

@Momblogger, one of the noisiest anti-Willie Revillame bloggers who harassed advertisers into pulling out their ads from Willing Willie, admits that she doesn’t watch TV. And yet she judges its content? Is she on drugs or something. Hypocrites. 7:11 pm yesterday

At ikaw Emily Abrera, magtigil ka! You ran McCann-Erickson for years. Among your clients are the same advertisers who supported what you now denounce as TV game shows that dumb down Filipinos. Nakaupo ka lang sa CCP akala mo kung sino ka nang magsalita. Hypocrite! 7:15 pm yesterday

At ikaw John Silva, ikaw na hitad ka, wag kang magmalinis dahil, sa totoo lang, what you’re doing — seeking grants just for the sake of seeking grants and teaching others to do it — is pangraraket at panggagamit din ng ibang tao. Kung gusto niyo tulungan si Janjan, tulungan niyo lang. Wag niyo ng gamitin ang bata para lang mailabas nyo ang pagkamuhi niyo sa mga baduy na kagaya ni Willie Revillame. 7:27 pm yesterday

Ikaw naman Etta Rosales, grow some balls naman. Wag ka kaagad nagpapadala sa ingay ng ilang taong nag-aastang promoter and protector of good taste ng mga Pilipino. Dilawan ka na nga sa pulitika, dilawan ka pa rin sa isyu na to? Naknangtokwa ka.  7:32 pm yesterday

At ikaw Honey Carandang, una, palitan mo na palayaw mo. Kadiri pakinggan na Honey tawag sa isang may edad na na tulad mo. Pangalawa, ayusin mo naman yang practice mo. Wag kang pagamit sa ABS-CBN. Just because ikaw daw ang pinakasikat na child psychologist sa bansa e puede ka ng mag-diagnose sa isang bata without even talking to him first. (Regards kay Ricky.)  7:35 pm yesterday

At ikaw Dinky Soliman, ayusin mo trabaho mo. Sa kaso ni Janjan, saka lang kayo umaksyon nung nag-ingay na sa Internet, almost 2 weeks after the March 12 episode. Dapat March 13 pa lang, nagwala na kayo. E pinalampas niyo pa ilang araw. Ano hinintay niyo – matuyo ang highlights mo? Ang labas tuloy, ginawa niyo lang ito kasi may nag-ingay. E paano kung wala? (Lose the highlights, by the way. It affects your thinking.) 7:40 pm yesterday

plagiarism and, uh, krip yuson? is that you?

update 4 : Krip Yuson: A portrait of the Filipino as a plagiarist

update 3 : are we forgiving plagiarism?

update 2 : Ruins and monuments: A collective statement on the plagiarism of Krip Yuson

update 1 : plagiarism apology as can of worms

i sent the following two links to my brother butch after a conversation re editors & authors.   he doesn’t know krip personally but has heard me speak of him and he has seen krip’s books in bookstores and has even read an essay or two, i think.

Hall of Fame writer Krip Yuson plagiarizes for Rogue Magazine PBA article
Famed writer Krip Yuson apologizes for plagiarism

his response:

I read the Yuson blogs.
It’s a whole different world.
Brutal, cruel.

And his response, an amusing attempt at damage control.
Like he consulted a boardroom of colleagues and friends for advice and used everything that was tossed on his plate.

(1) I was pressed for time
(2) I wasn’t thinking right.
(3) I feel like a heel.
(4) I will just have to bear the blows.
(5) Thank you for reminding me of my responsibilities.
(6) Maybe, I’ve gotten old and jaded.
(7) Maybe I’m overworked.
(8) [Again]. . . Maybe the deadline pressure got to me [same as (1)]
(9) [I think there was also this] I think having edited it, I considered myself a co-author.

How about. . .
(10) I didn’t think I would get caught.
(11) Maybe, I was caught in a black hole of some extended reality.

All in all, a sorry ass attempt at damage control.

B.