Being a plagiarist in today’s media world is taken very seriously indeed. On the other hand, being plagiarized one’s self, reporting it to the offending outlet and attempting to see if action is taken against the guilty party … eh, not so much.
Which leads to an interesting conundrum: How is an outlet supposed to police its reporters if plagiarism goes unreported or is shrugged off by the plagiarized party? If the outlets whose words were lifted had neglected to tell The New York Times of the incident, wouldn’t Jayson Blair still be employed, still using the same tactics, much to the detriment of his employer? How would they ever have weeded him out without being informed of the offenses?
This question is highlighted by two responses from reporters who were alerted that their work had been plagiarized by GOPUSA/Talon News.
First, there’s Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The New York Times, who was notified February 7, 2005, that lines from her article, “Congress Ratifies Bush Victory After a Rare Challenge,” which carries the byline of James Dao as well, had been lifted by Steve Roeder for a Talon News article entitled “Dems Fail in Ohio Electoral Vote Challenge.”
Stolberg’s response? A ten-word email: “oh well. imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” Funny how her employer didn’t view their own plagiarist as a simple flatterer.
A follow-up email was sent to Stolberg: “Oh well? You’re not even in the least bit curious as to how a ‘news company’ named Talon News has somehow managed to garner close connections to the White House … even though at least two of its main reporters have no journalistic background and are out-and-out plagiarists? I don’t think Talon News is flattering you.”
Stolberg responded, “I was being wry.” And those seem to be the last public words on the matter from any representative of the Grey Lady despite repeated attempts to engage Stolberg and Byron Calame, Public Editor for The New York Times since June of 2005.
When a lesser-known journalist, Melissa Beecher of The Daily News Tribune and The Metro West Daily News in Massachusetts, was informed that Jeff Gannon, in his article, "Homeschooling Parents Threatened With Loss of Children," lifted from Beecher’s article, “Home-schooling standoff in Waltham,” she and her former employer initially took a much more serious view of the situation than did Stolberg and the Times.
The story centered on a Massachusetts family whose home-schooled children were threatened with arrest because their parents refused to allow them to take a standardized test. Beecher was the only reporter “on the scene” and her article was a true exclusive, in every sense of the word.
In a March 21, 2005, email, Beecher wrote: “Thank you for bringing this to my attention. You are correct, I was the only reporter at this ‘event’ and reported on a first-hand experience. I have forwarded your email to the editors at the Community Newspaper Company, who will hopefully forward this information to the lawyers at The Boston Herald.” [Herald Media Inc. is the parent organization for The Daily News Tribune, The Metro West Daily News, the Community Newspaper Company, and The Boston Herald]
In a subsequent email Beecher added: “I can tell you that your email has been passed from my former editor, Brad Spiegel, to the editor in chief at the Metro West Daily News, Richard Lodge. If he hasn’t already, Richard should be notifying the Herald’s attorneys. I was the only media at this standoff and Mr. Gannon, or Mr. Guckert, could not have obtained the quotes he used without being there.”
In an interview with Raw Story’s John Byrne appearing March 31, Beecher referred to Gannon’s plagiarism as “unethical and upsetting,” but Lodge went further and called him a “liar.”
Lodge also hit upon the significance of the Talon News plagiarism: "When somebody sets himself up to be a credible journalist, however the heck he did that—and I think it happened because nobody questioned him—then he is tainting all of us legitimate journalists. Because whatever questions he’s asking, and whatever stories he’s allegedly writing, are suspect. And I think that makes readers suspect all of us.”
Lodge informed the paper’s attorneys, but told Byrne that the corporation decided not to take any legal action against Gannon, Talon News or editor Bobby Eberle, with no further explanation offered.
An informal survey of other journalists seems to reinforce this “graver sin is sinning” stance of outlets. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, for example, says, “I think the leniency would more likely be shown if our work was plagiarized, not if we did the plagiarizing.” He does add, however, “Certainly the public can play a useful role in bringing plagiarism to light. I would guess it’s a bigger problem in academia than in the media.”
David Margolick, a former New York Times reporter now on staff at Vanity Fair, says, “I don’t think the public particularly cares about such things, but certainly the industry does. There are few humiliations worse than being charged with it. This is probably why it’s relatively uncommon. Also, nowadays it’s harder to get away with it. Everyone is much more attentive. After all, a woman in Texas blew the whistle on Jayson Blair.”
Milbank echoes Margolick’s view on whether the average reader is concerned about the issue: “I suspect the public cares more about falsification than plagiarism because if something accurate is plagiarized, it’s a sourcing issue rather than a factual misrepresentation. The ‘industry’ cares but I think there are bigger problems to worry about.”
John Stanton of Congressional Daily and National Journal, agrees with Milbank that while plagiarism is a problem, it’s minor compared to others that dog journalism. Stanton argues, “Too much attention to an issue like plagiarism – which ranks nowhere near other problems like bias, planted stories, personal connections to sources and simply made-up stuff – is very harmful. A certain level of osmosis is inevitable, since we’re constantly reading each other’s stuff, swapping observations, confirming quotes and generally talking shop.”
And Stanton addresses head-on the question of the varying levels of credibility in the profession that are at stake. “I think the public cares to the degree that it brings into question an individual reporter’s credibility, assuming they had an audience and/or credibility in the first place. For instance, in the Jeff Gannon case, his primary audience was bloggers being paid by the Thune campaign to take shots at the Argus and, to a lesser degree, Daschle. They, in turn, were aimed at MSM [main stream media] reporters and talk radio outlets in the state. So any instances in which Jeff may have stolen someone’s work end up really being a secondary concern – not to mention the fact that Talon was known as a GOP operation.”
All three reporters agree that any formal institutional process to alert other outlets to plagiarism of their own material is vague at best. Milbank says, “I don’t think there’s a standard procedure but I suspect the offending publication would be alerted.” Margolick affirms, “I don’t know what the standard procedure is, but if you have the goods on someone, you or your organization should certainly let them know.”
Stanton too is unclear. “As far as I know,” he says, “there’s no standard way to inform other outlets that they’ve printed plagiarized material.”
He adds, “I’m not really sure what, if anything, the companies I’ve worked for have done officially to deal with the problem – an answer that I think speaks volumes about the state of the journalism business.”
Contributors: susie dow, sawcielackey and wanderindiana
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