Top 5 lessons from the LWL saga

By Felix Cheong

IT AIN’T over till the good doctor stops posting.

Those of us more kaypoh than your friendly neighbourhood aunty would, no doubt, have followed Dr Lee Wei Ling’s fight with The Straits Times (ST) over the past week.

In the grand scheme of things, of course, it was a spat of no consequence. No policy nor police were involved. Nothing more cutting than words were used and certainly, nothing more durable than ego was harmed.

Still, it was a spectacle drawing punters and puns alike, not least because an unstoppable Hakka woman (from a VVIP family some more) meets head-on an immovable object (a blue-chip company some more). All that’s missing from this equivalent of a car wreck is a 4D number.

So, here we are, almost at endgame, after ST’s Associate Editor, Ivan Fernandez, published a detailed rebuttal on Saturday (April 9) to say why Dr Lee’s column, which had criticised the over-the-top commemoration of Lee Kuan Yew’s one-year death anniversary, had to be edited. Not just for brevity and clarity, but also to remove plagiarised bits.

As we take five to take a leak (hopefully, not of Panamanian proportions!), and because “learning culture” is the new G buzzword, here are five lessons from this episode:

Lesson #1: Don’t make public what should be private

There’s a reason you should do your laundry at home: so that no one knows the colour of your secrets.

When Dr Lee posted a Facebook update on April 1 that she would no longer write for SPH, tongues started wagging. Public sympathy was with her at first, especially from people who exercise regularly by jumping to conclusions.

But as the punches came, faster than Rocky Balboa could dodge, it soon became clear who was on the ropes. This was especially after Dr Lee had made public her unedited article which, to my mind, is rambling with long detours into Mao and Churchill.

This seemed to reinforce Mr Janadas Devan’s (more on him in a while) point that reading her unedited writing was like “sailing through a fog”. There is no doubt how much sailing had to be done to go through her fog (and perhaps all her previous pieces too).

Before I start rambling too, here’s the rub: Make sure you’ve a solid case (check for expiry date) before appearing in public with the goods. If not, keep it behind closed doors, where your reputation remains safe.

Lesson #2: Stick to the issue

Somewhere along the line, to make a point about her father not censoring or gagging people, Dr Lee dragged Mr Devan into the ring. That broke the Internet – former President Devan Nair’s son, now the Chief of Government Communications, slugging it out with the daughter of LKY? Wow, bring out the popcorn!

It turned out to be a non-sequitur because the issue was never about Mr Devan, nor about former ST editor-in-chief Cheong Yip Seng’s book, OB Markers: My Straits Times Story. What was merely an example to prove a point had instead become a subplot, an aside that totally missed the point.

Lesson #3: Know when to lose the battle but win the war

After this round with Mr Devan, Dr Lee wasn’t about to let it go. Oh no. She obviously hadn’t watched the Disney cartoon, Frozen.

When The Straits Times published its first rebuttal, a mercifully short one, on April 5, it didn’t mention the paragraphs that had to be cut out because of plagiarism. Now if Dr Lee had left it at that, she would’ve walked away, slightly bruised but none the worse for wear.

Instead, she published her unedited column on Facebook, which eventually led to ST, bo pian, rebutting her a second – and hopefully, final – time on April 9. That was the checkmate move.

As the great military strategist Sun Tze once wrote: “He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.” It would’ve been better for Dr Lee to have quietly slipped away and licked her wounds. Fight ST another day.

Lesson #4: Membership has its privileges

Many of us in the trade would’ve gasped to learn the number of email exchanges between Dr Lee and Mr Fernandez over the column in dispute: Over 40, all in one week in March.

That’s a full-time job in itself! No columnist I know of (including myself) would’ve had this kind of access to an editor’s time. The rule of thumb: If the copy from a freelance columnist is not delivered clean, with minimal edits, then it’s spiked (journalist’s jargon for killing a story). Rewriting it wholesale – and patiently taking the writer through the edits – is just not a done thing.

But we’re not talking about any columnist, are we?

Lesson #5: Do not copy and paste

Finally, according to ST, Dr Lee committed a cardinal sin in journalism and academia: plagiarism. Two passages, from The Guardian and an obscure website, were cited by ST as evidence.

Open-and-shut case: If one of my undergrads had done something similar, he would’ve received zero for the assignment and a warning from the school.

Instead, Dr Lee, in a Facebook update on April 9, defended her action, stating she doesn’t need the ST column to advance her curriculum vitae (err, beside the point).

She added: “So I leave my readers to judge me fairly, whether I intentionally plagiarised or as a filial daughter I wanted to stop any attempts at hagiography at the first anniversary of my father’s death.”

Why stopping hagiography requires an act of plagiarism (intentional or otherwise) is beyond me at this stage in my cerebral development. Suffice to say, it doesn’t make her case any stronger (see lesson #1).

So, in all fairness, with all due respect to all concerned: let it go. We’re already out of popcorn, and patience.

 

Featured image of Newspaper Bundles by Flickr user Greg Habermann CC BY 2.0

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The post Top 5 lessons from the LWL saga appeared first on The Middle Ground.

- Felix Cheong