Thread by @OzKaterji

Who is ready for @OwenJones84/@Guardian to be forced into a humiliating retraction over his latest piece? One that exposes how lazy he is as a "journalist", who is so committed to his own ideological bubble that he has published an egregious error.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

This is not a small mistake, but first I want to point out that this truly does reveal how little research he does, he badly read he is on foreign policy, national security and defence, and why he has no business writing on any of these topics. This is why he is bad at his job.

This is the paragraph in question. You will notice that unlike the words of Tony Blair, "House of Commons defence select committee concluded" has not been hyperlinked. Odd, given that this should be easy to find, the select committee is on the public record.

Did the House of Commons Defence Select Committee "conclude" that? No, they categorically did not.

If you are interested in reading what they actually did conclude, please find the link below: publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cm…

So if they didn't conclude this, where did Owen pluck this paragraph from? I'm not accusing him of fabricating it, it very much exists, and it even exists inside the Defence Select Committee report!

Unfortunately for Owen, this line is from the Written Evidence section.

But wait, who did the House of Commons Defence Select Committee receive this piece of alarming written evidence from? It's certainly published in the annex, it's on the public record, maybe this is guidance submitted by a senior public official?
It's a Memorandum from Greenpeace

So Owen Jones in his little newspaper column where he wants to lecture people on defence has clearly not read the report that he is citing, and is falsely attributing a memorandum written by an anti-nuclear weapons charity as the conclusion of a select committee. Very bad.

BUT WAIT. THERE'S MORE.

How could Owen Jones have possibly made this mistake? Did he read the report at all? Can any other examples be found of someone else making this exact same mistake that he may have, in fact, plagiarised?

Ladies and gentlemen, I present you with the final piece of evidence. This mistake exists, in print, and it's from a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament leaflet, available at the link below.

cnduk.org/wp-content/upl…

Instead of reading the Defence Committee report (hard. Big words. Requires working knowledge of subject matter), he instead read a leaflet by his friends and fellow activists at the CND (easy, bitesize chunks for tiny brains, facts don't matter).

This is not a small deal. This is a big fucking deal for a journalist, and a newspaper, to make a mistake like this.

And I expect the retraction will be imminent.

This is not journalism, it's an abject dereliction of the basic responsibilities of a journalist. Owen is not interested in facts, he's interested in quotes that reinforce his worldview, and that of his friends.

He is not prepared to do the basic, minimum, 101 research required to formulate an opinion on anything he writes about in the field of foreign policy, defence or national security.

He simply is just regurgitating what his cranky Trot mates hand out at protests. The fact that The Guardian published this without fact-checking it is an embarrassment.

I will be emailing my complaints to the appropriate department and I suggest you do the same.

Please write your complaints about this here. Journalists are not allowed to misattribute quotes, nor lift lines from material that is not cited. This error is both factually wrong & a violation of basic journalistic due diligence. Many people have been fired for less.

It's almost an aside at this point to also point out that this report was published in 2006. We are not in the same security situation in Britain as we were in 2006. To even cite that report for this purpose is utterly ridiculous. He's not even trying, he's phoning it in.

Again, this requires Owen to have done research on Libya, or Syria, or Salafi-Jihadism, and he has repeatedly demonstrated that he has no interest in doing any of that, despite frequently publishing articles discussing these subjects

https://x.com/JimmySecUK/status/1781063797341376746

More embarrassingly for the Guardian, this is in fact not even the first time this mistake has been printed, here it is from February in an article by Simon Tisdall - this time however with a hyperlink to the annex, but somehow without realising that it is in fact not the conclusion of the committee, but a Greenpeace memorandum. amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Unbelievable - The Guardian have simply just changed the line without issuing a proper retraction.

The Guardian have now FINALLY added a correction note, after first changing the line without adding one.

And the icing on the cake. Owen somehow allegedly misattributed a quote from Greenpeace to the Defence Select Committee because he was groggy from dental surgery.

Just fucking absurd. Legitimately utterly ludicrous.

The piece was arguing that Parliament's own select committee was making this point, now it's saying that Greenpeace are making it. This isn't a sloppy error, it entirely changes the context and meaning of that paragraph. I cannot believe the audacity of these people.

His argument was that even the British political establishment do not recognise Trident as an effective deterrent, but that was not the case, that was the opinion of Greenpeace, rendering that entire paragraph utterly meaningless.

"I misattributed a quote in my column, which has been repeatedly misattributed"

This is plain as day, he is admitting he did not read the defence select committee report, and he instead copied it from elsewhere and assumed it was true.

That's an egregious error, one a rookie journalist would be fired over. Jones has been in the industry longer than me.

Dear @OwenJones84, let me make this perfectly clear, I personally think your "groggy" tweet discussing "misattribution" is tantamount to a confession of plagiarism. I think you used the CND pamphlet and its argument as the basis for your article, and you did so without citing it. I believe you used their false citation of a report, which you did not read, and tried to pass it off as if you had researched this yourself.

You may want to pretend that this had something to do with dentistry, but you've been rumbled. Your article was intellectually lazy, dishonest, and an ethical violation of your duties as a journalist.

If you want to turn this into a fight about me, again, rather than your utter failure to do your job properly, go right ahead, but everyone can see right through it.