In their April 21, 2008 issue, The New Yorker published an article by professor and bestselling author Jared "Gun, Germs and Steel" Diamond titled, "Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even?"
The article was essentially about a man from Papua, New Guinea (PNG) who had, claimed Diamond, instigated a series of tribal wars—including one nicknamed "pig in the garden"—in order to extract revenge for the death of his uncle. This allegedly occurred in PNG's Southern Highlands years earlier and left nearly 50 people dead, women raped, property stolen, villages terrorized. The person responsible was, said Diamond, none other than his hired driver, an indigenous PNG man named Daniel Wemp.
As I read the article at the time, my b.s. detector was firing on all cylinders. I was struck by how unreal the stories Diamond reported as fact really seemed, how conveniently they meshed with his theme, how dubious were the assertions, how weak the attributions and how much like a college professor the quotes attributed to this indigenous man, whose main language is pidgin, sounded (e.g., "Boys and young men are prone to make such mistakes and hence are excluded from the stealth parties").
I was not surprised to discover that, though his article was labeled by the magazine as being from "the annals of anthropology," Diamond is, in fact, not an anthropologist. He is apparently not a journalist, either, because a story of this magnitude—one that accuses named people of committing capital crimes—demands multiple voices, carefully cited and easily verifiable sources. It also requires the permission from the people quoted to use their material in a published work, or, at least, to make them aware that their information will be used in a published work.
One major problem, starting out: Diamond had only one source—Daniel Wemp. Second major problem: Diamond never extended Wemp the courtesy of telling him that he was going to publish his assertions about these wars of revenge in The New Yorker. Third major problem: The New Yorker, whose reputation for fact checking is legendary, never verified a single quote, fact, date or criminal assertion in Diamond's article before it was printed. They never even contacted Daniel Wemp! Ironically, two issues ago, The New Yorker published a self-serving, back-patting story by John McPhee that celebrated the magazine's fact-checking prowess on his own work.
And, of course, my initial suspicions about Diamond's article were borne out last week. On April 20, 2009—almost exactly one year after the article was published—Daniel Wemp and Henep Isum, two of the named tribal combatants, filed a suit in New York Supreme Court for $10 million in compensatory damages against Diamond and Advance Publications (which owns The New Yorker).
Rhonda Roland Shearer, director of the Art Science Research Laboratory, is responsible for bringing this sordid and shameful tale to light. Her journalism ethics site, www.stinkyjournalism.org, has all the details of the case as it unfolded. Thanks largely to her team's tireless efforts, the indigenous peoples whose lives were damaged by the article will have their day in court.
After reading through Shearer's longer 70-page report on the case and the abridged version now up on Shearer's website, I am, frankly, shocked by the arrogance of Diamond and The New Yorker. One can't help but conclude that neither the swaggering professor nor the big-city magazine believed that indigenous cultures were worthy of basic ethical courtesies like fact checking and accurate quotations.
They may be finding out soon that, with published material available anywhere on the planet via the Internet, it's not such a big world, after all.
