I was recently interviewed for a Chicago Sun-Times story about plagiarism. The story, by Mike Thomas, appeared in Sunday's paper and contains a lot of good information and insight about the recent rash of plagiarism. (I wrote about this disturbing trend for The Huffington Post.) The article is not online, but here are some key excerpts:
Steal traps: Sleuthing software makes it easier than ever to catch a plagiarist, so why do writers keeping ripping off the words of others?
Like bird flu and Arctic temperatures, plagiarism is on the rise. More than ever, it seems, writers siphon stuff from the Internet, books, magazines and newspapers and pass it off as their own, apparently oblivious to the seriousness of this ethical lapse -- not to mention the hailstorm of shame and criticism it invites.
A sampling of recent alleged offenders -- thanks in part to whom the media's credibility collapse continues -- includes an undergrad novelist at Harvard; a longtime reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; a scriptwriter at NBC; a reporter at the New York Post, and (accused just last week) conservative columnist Ann Coulter. They belong to a club whose membership roster is long and occasionally luminous.
Here's the head-scratcher: Despite a higher-than-ever likelihood that plagiarists will be outed by keen eyes with access to Google (plug in a phrase and let the magic begin; software takes mere seconds or minutes to scour databases to pinpoint pilfered passages for vigilant overseers who smell a rip-off artist), writers and reporters continue to steal away.
And while the conscious or unconscious rehashing of previously penned words and sentences certainly falls under the plagiarism umbrella, as does the sloppy rewriting of Wikipedia copy (ditto), they aren't what floor me most. (I'm also inclined, for the purposes of this piece and in general, to omit obvious literary and musical homages. Sometimes Dickens and Zeppelin say it best.) What I'm really flabbergasted by is the blatant, almost unfathomable lifting of original material in mass quantities -- entire paragraphs and pages, word for mother-loving word.
In shoplifting terms, that's like walking into a department store, donning the garment of your choice and sashaying out the front door like you own the thing. Only at most places, they'd nab you in a nanosecond. In the journalistic and literary world, it can take years.
According to the Web site www.regrettheerror.com, which exhaustively catalogs media screw-ups, there've been 12 incidents (in case you're wondering, that's a lot) of high-profile plagiarism so far in 2006, including New York Post scribe Andy Geller's June 9 piece on the dead terrorist honcho Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Per a June 27 Daily News account gloatingly headlined "Copycat Postie put on ice for a month," Geller was suspended "after the newspaper discovered he copied massive sections of an article from the New York Times." Once more, for emphasis: "Massive sections." My own comparison of the two articles verified it.
'What are the punishments?'
"Every case is just a bit different from the other, but you can't seemingly categorize them," said John Lesko, an assistant professor of applied linguistics at Saginaw Valley State University. In his spare time, Lesko edits the scholarly journal Plagiary, www.plagiary.org, and runs the Web site www.famousplagiarists.com, which has "a backlog of cases" waiting to be posted.
"Now and then you have cases where genuine mistakes have been made and people forget to put something in quotations," he said. "But then you have cases where people seem to keep doing the same thing over and over again. It's almost like they're wanting to be caught."
Although several of the authors, journalists, politicians and business titans who've been caught with their proverbial pants (or skirts) down have paid the price with lost jobs, canceled book contracts, tarnished reputations and extended leaves of absence, plagiarism remains an arbitrarily punishable act for lack of a standard penal code.
"We need a systematic investigation of plagiarism in publishing today," said Poynter Institute senior faculty member and writing coach Chip Scanlan. "If we put a criminal justice overlay, we need to know: Is there a plagiaristic misdemeanor? Is there a plagiarism felony? And if so, what are the punishments?"
"You can see incidents that may be very similar, and in one case the person is fired and in another case they're suspended," said Craig Silverman, a free-lance writer who helms regrettheerror.com. "Or sometimes you get one of these mealy-mouthed explanations saying, 'It was an accident, and because of that they've been reprimanded,' and that's it. And I think that's really disturbing to readers, because if they spot a few different incidents and if they happen to read about them and they see that there's this total lack of a standard in how to handle it, it makes them think the media is very haphazard in the way it punishes something that is really one of the high crimes of the industry."
That some filchers get a gentle "tsk, tsk" while others are dragged through the mea culpa wringer isn't surprising. What is surprising, however, is that so few effective measures are taken by media outlets big and small to stop this shady practice before it starts. Or before it leaves the building, anyway.
Rocked by scandals, major papers such as the New York Times and USA Today have hired watchdogs who keep eyes peeled for copycats and deceptive behavior in general. The Times also hits its prospective free lancers with the following query: "Has anything you've written later resulted in a published editor's note or retraction for deliberate falsehood or plagiarism or become the subject of a lawsuit involving allegations of deliberate falsehood?"
As if thieves would cop to thievery.
And some book publishers, presumably, are a bit warier these days following the Kaavya Viswanathan chaos that swirled around Little, Brown and Company in April when it was discovered that the 19-year-old Harvard student pinched parts of her book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life from another author. (The earlier James A Million Little Pieces Frey debacle at Random House/Oprah was a jolter too, but at least the words in question were his.) Among glossies, mags such as the New Yorker and Harper's famously have teams of dedicated fact-checkers who vigorously vet copy by, for example, calling sources to confirm quotes and details.
An ounce of prevention
Across the board, however, they're the exception. Many publishing houses, magazines and newspapers, including the Sun-Times, don't have the time, resources or, let's face it, the inclination to adopt a blanket pro-active approach -- to zero in on every single sentence and ascertain its originality. Overworked editors are one line of defense, but they're only human.
Take those in the newspaper realm. Countless thousands of phrases pass before their eyes every day. Stories require line editing, copy editing and layout, which leaves little time to notice whether or not a writer has cribbed from CNN.com or the Daily Kos. Even if there were ample opportunity to do so, what person on earth has every book, magazine, newspaper, journal and Web site cataloged in his/her brain and so thoroughly memorized as to immediately perceive suspicious similarities?
And so, for better or worse, it falls on the writer to straighten up and fly right before things take a nose-dive. Then again, that may be asking too much.
"The reason [plagiarism] happens is because we are not attacking it before the fact," said Scanlan, whose journalism advice column appears at www.poynter.org...
"We're not transparent enough," he continues. "I think we need to say, 'Look, it's easy to plagiarize. It's easier than ever. You can cut and paste things. And if you don't understand the concept of intellectual property, if you don't understand what it means to plagiarize -- that it means the theft of someone else's words -- you need that driven pretty deep into you.' "
Silverman is of the same mind. "The reality is that errors, plagiarism and fabrication do occur more often than anyone is comfortable with," he writes in an e-mail, "and yet I'm unaware of any newspaper that has integrated a truly rigorous fact-checking or authorship program to prevent these changes. Checking eveything in the paper is not realistic, but more can be done, and I think that technology can play a major role."
...Largely ignoring the 800-pound monkey on their backs is one way of dealing with it.
"There's an institutional aspect of it, where if you're running a newspaper or you're running a book publishing company and somebody you employ or one of your writers plagiarizes, you kind of want to believe that it's not true," Silverman said. "Especially if they're somebody who's been with you a long time. And so I think there is a natural human desire to want to find an explanation and say, 'Oh, it was accidental or inadvertent.' And that's very harmful. Sometimes hope overtakes what the reality is. If you want to look at plagiarism as a sickness, I think denial is definitely one of the symptoms."
More than ever, though, it's detox or die.