Pearson ABC-bashing update

Today The Australian published a correction in relation to Christopher Pearson’s weekend column in which he maliciously attacked the ABC’s bookselling enterprise.

Correction

Christopher Pearson’s Inquirer column in The Weekend Australian mentioned a number of works on ABC Books’ list of titles, erroneously assuming that ABC Books was also their publisher. The books were categorised as recommended and there were no other publishers’ details listed.

• The Australian, Monday, 6 November 2006, page 4
  (print edition only)

Well, I’m darned if I can find any ‘Recommended’ category of books on the ABC Shop website. On the other hand, it’s true that publishers’ details are not given with the description of books. However, Pearson’s assumption of the ABC as publisher of all those titles, if not merely carelessly sloppy, could be characterised as subliterate incompetence. Yet readers are supposed to accept this person’s opinion as informed...?

In today’s edition of Crikey, Margaret Simons notes that Pearson’s malicious attack is “revealing of the low standards apparently considered acceptable if you are bashing the ABC.”

I am reminded of another columnist, Terry Lane, who offered to resign from The Sunday Age earlier this year after falling for an Internet hoax. Lane was honest enough to admit: “I fell for it because I wanted to believe it. That is inexcusable.”

The issues are a quantum leap apart, of course – who published some books in Pearson’s case compared to allegations of human rights abuses in Lane’s case – but the issue of intellectual honesty is the same.

• Crikey, Monday, 6 November 2006
  (subscription required, no link available)

Simons might have further said that the allegations were of gross human rights abuses, which implied a frightful libel of serving coalition personnel. Yet the ethical dimensions of the two cases do seem somehow different, hinging on the respective motivations of Lane and Pearson. Lane has been reasonably upfront about his stupidity, but we’ve yet to hear from Pearson.