The Risks of New Writing

In the past twelve months, Quadrant has increased the size of each edition to 128 pages. This is 33.3 per cent more than our previous monthly editions and is the same size as our former double issues in January-February and July-August. We did this partly to accommodate an increase in the number of good articles, both commissions and submissions, we had in hand. We also did it as part of a strategy to broaden the appeal of the journal by introducing new writing. In the ten issues of the past year, we published twenty-seven non-fiction writers whose work was new to Quadrant. This exercise stretched the limits of our very modest publishing resources.

One of those new contributors turned out to be the little-known left-wing political activist Katherine Wilson who, under the name Sharon Gould, wrote an article we published in our January-February edition entitled “Scare Campaigns and Science Reporting”. The article was submitted in bad faith and contained a small number of false statements, in particular that the CSIRO had abandoned some experiments in genetic modification of food for fear of adverse public reaction. When this misrepresentation was exposed, some of our political opponents in the press responded with more glee than was warranted. It was not a good hoax. It did not hit us anywhere we hurt. We had not even discussed the subject of GM foods in the past year, let alone been an enthusiast for the topic.

Any publication that accepts freelance contributions is vulnerable to such tactics. All publications have an obligation to their readers to do a basic job of fact-checking, which Quadrant did in this case. The incidents, authors, publications and institutions named in the article all checked out accurately. However, there is a point beyond which such sub-editing practices cannot go, especially when dealing with an author’s discussion of the detailed content of several books and their footnotes. There comes a point at which all publishers have to take their authors on trust. We will continue with our basic presumption that anyone who submits work to us for publication is trustworthy, unless there are grounds for thinking otherwise.

Hence, this incident will not affect Quadrant’s willingness to accept work from new authors. We still welcome their work and will judge it entirely on merit. Rather than retreat to the security of only publishing known writers, we prefer the same risk we were running before. Those who want to exploit our position in order to perpetrate cheap political stunts can only do so by betraying the trust required by a free culture and open      discussion. As Simon Caterson wrote on literary hoaxes in our July-August 2008 edition:

Culture, like the wider society it seeks to approximate, requires self-regulation to a very large extent, and transgressors who cause damage to the fabric of trust and responsibility should expect to pay a price for doing so.

Keith Windschuttle