How And Why Lying About Plagiarism Is Bad – A Response To Fareed Zakaria And Fred Hiatt https://t.co/LPYcircje5 via Our Bad Media
— reckless blupman (@blippoblappo) August 20, 2014
I have said multiple times here that attribution is the difference between plagiarism and research.
I also have said many times that linking is a matter of journalism ethics and that if journalists were expected to link to their digital sources, editors would prevent plagiarism more effectively and detect it more quickly.
Fareed Zakaria apparently did more research than attribution in some of his work for Time, CNN and the Washington Post. And his failure to link to sources — and his newsrooms’ failure to demand links — has damaged his credibility as a journalist, however this latest accusation plays out.
The media watchdogs who caught Buzzfeed editor Benny Johnson plagiarizing, known only as @blippoblappo and @crushingbort, have documented a dozen cases of apparent plagiarism by Zakaria. All of the incidents they cite occurred prior to the 2012 incident when Zakaria was suspended for plagiarizing the work of the New Yorker’s Jill LePore.
His employers then said they reviewed his previous work, satisfying themselves that the theft was, in the words of Time’s official statement, “an isolated incident.” On their Our Bad Media blog, the watchdogs say that they needed only “less than an hour and a few Google searches” to find a dozen examples of Zakaria using verbatim passages or lightly rewritten passages from other news sources. So they rightly question how rigorously Zakaria’s employers reviewed his work, a question Craig Silverman raised in 2012.
When Zakaria plagiarism scandal broke in ’12, I noted orgs involved weren’t clear abt process for reviewing his work: http://t.co/TryocPrn2J
— Craig Silverman (@CraigSilverman) August 19, 2014
Now it looks like the reviews by CNN, Wash Post, Time were not rigorous. Good on Our Bad Media for doing the work: https://t.co/1bzqMQOS84
— Craig Silverman (@CraigSilverman) August 19, 2014
Media orgs that fail to do a real review of a plagiarist’s prev. work fail to meet accountability they demand of those they cover. Shameful.
— Craig Silverman (@CraigSilverman) August 19, 2014
Read the Our Bad Media piece, Zakaria’s response and the Our Bad Media response to Zakaria to decide for yourself whether this was blatant plagiarism or some murky less-offensive situation of poor attribution. In most of the incidents, Zakaria appears to have rewritten the similar passages slightly, rather than lifting passages verbatim. But here’s the point: You don’t make it OK to take someone else’s work by just changing a few words. You turn theft or the appearance of theft into good journalism by attributing, linking and quoting, and Zakaria never did that.
In three of the cases, as the accusers note in their second post, the similar passages are verbatim or nearly so. Even the short 11-word identical passage would be a huge coincidence for Zakaria to write the same 11 words in the same order. But the other verbatim ripoffs are 44 words (with just one word change, plus the removal of attribution from the original passage) and 39 words (with three small changes). You have to be a huge believer in coincidence to buy Zakaria’s blanket explanation in those cases, “These are all facts, not someone else’s writing or opinions or expressions.” He did not address any of those passages specifically, but in all three cases, the accusation and the appearance are not that he used the same facts, but that he stole their words. At the very least, Zakaria needs to address these instances specifically. His explanation so far doesn’t wash.
But here’s my point: If Zakaria’s response is 100 percent truthful (@blippoblappo and @crushingbort say he’s lying), it makes my case that you should attribute and link.
Zakaria used facts he couldn’t possibly have known (or verified) without looking them up somewhere: The federal-spending percentage of GDP in the Reagan years, Pentagon spending under different presidents, the history of Greek debt. It’s not a sign of weakness to cite and link to your sources of such information, confirming that you don’t have all those facts stored away in your memory bank. It’s a courtesy to readers, who deserve to know how you know that, and where to look if they want to see for themselves (or if they want more information).
Zakaria appears to have ripped off some authoritative sources: the New Yorker (again), his then-Washington Post colleague Ezra Klein, Businessweek and The Nation. What in the world is wrong with citing and linking to such sources?
One of the sources he ripped off was Wikipedia, which even Wikipedia itself says is not a credible primary source (though I’ve noted that journalists’ scorn of Wikipedia is outdated). But Wikipedia (unlike too many journalism organizations) requires links and citations. If Zakaria didn’t want to admit that he got his Reagonomics numbers from Wikipedia, all he had to do was click on the Wikipedia citation and get the numbers directly from the Congressional Budget Office and cite and link to them.
Here’s what Zakaria had to say about that passage:
In one column, I note that the national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan. The bloggers point out that this is also in Wikipedia’s Reagan entry. But it is also in hundreds of other articles, studies, and reports — just Google the phrase. Until today, I had never read the Wikipedia entry for Ronald Reagan. As it happens, it is incorrect. (There is a difference between “public debt” – Wikipedia’s words — and national debt.)
This example is almost as damning as the verbatim example, if the @blippoblappo/@crushingbort piece is correct (I checked their links, and it looks like they’re right):
Zakaria’s implication that the difference between public debt and national debt (for the uninitiated, national debt = public debt + intergovernmental debt) makes his piece divergent from the Wikipedia article is bizarre. If he thought there was a difference, why did he cite the same numbers ($712 billion to $2 trillion) for the national debt that Wikipedia uses for the public debt? Here’s the kicker: by changing “public debt” to “national debt,” Zakaria is the one who ends up with an “incorrect” article. According to the CBO, public debt went from $712 billion in 1980 to $2 trillion in 1988. According to the Fed, national debt went from $909 billion in 1980 to $2.6 trillion in 1988.
This Zakaria explanation pretty much just says he’d rather not attribute:
My usual procedure with a piece of data that I encounter is to check it out, going as close to the original source as is possible. If the data is government generated (GDP, spending on pensions, tax rates, defense spending, etc) then I often don’t cite a source since it is in the public domain.
This confuses copyright with journalism ethics. Plagiarism is not just an offense against the writer whose words and work you stole. It’s an offense against your readers, who deserve to know our sources of information. If the data is government-generated, cite the source to show that you got it from the original source, not just from Wikipedia or from an interview with a source whose memory may or may not be faulty.
Back to the Zakaria response:
If it is a study or survey produced by a think tank, then I usually cite the institution that conducted the survey. In many of these cases, there was a link in my column to the source. This was not always possible, however, because Time magazine, for example, did not always allow for links. My columns are often data-heavy, so I try to use common sense, putting a source into the text when it was necessary.
Our Bad Media shreds that defense in detail, so I won’t repeat that here. I will acknowledge that many news organizations’ content management systems have made it difficult or impossible to hyperlink in stories. That’s why I disagree so vehemently with Poynter and the Society of Professional Journalists Ethics Committee about the importance of identifying linking as a matter of journalism ethics. News organizations have been slow to improve their content management systems or to require journalists to link when systems allow it. If we require linking as a matter of journalism ethics, we’ll upgrade both our systems and our practices.
As for this Zakaria point — “I try to use common sense, putting a source into the text when it was necessary” — sources are nearly always necessary.
Here’s the bottom line, whether you’re a student journalist or a multi-platform star like Zakaria: Readers and viewers want to know how we know what we know. We should attribute and link. Always.
Update: Our Bad Media have documented more extensive cases of apparent plagiarism by Zakaria.
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