Events | 2009.05.30
Open door | Siobhan Butterworth
The readers\' editor on ... the accidental plagiarist and the P-word
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd found herself in choppy water last week after someone noticed that a line she wrote in a column had been said before, and not by her. The words belonged to Josh Marshall, editor and publisher of Talking Points Memo.
He wrote: "More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq." She wrote word for word the same thing, except that in her piece "we were" became "the Bush crowd was".
Dowd\'s inglorious explanation, in an email to the Huffington Post, was that she hadn\'t read Marshall\'s blogpost, but she got the line from a friend who obviously had: "I wanted to weave the idea into my column. But, clearly, my friend must have read Josh Marshall without mentioning that to me," she said.
The New York Times published a correction and fixed things online so that Dowd\'s piece now attributes Marshall\'s words to him, rather than to her. Should Dowd, self-proclaimed accidental plagiarist, have had her epaulettes ceremoniously ripped off for this? Marshall doesn\'t think so: "I generally think we\'re too quick to pull the trigger with charges of plagiarism," he said in a blogpost last week. "Whatever the mechanics of how it happened, I never thought it was intentional. Dowd and the Times quickly corrected it, which I appreciated. And for me, that\'s pretty much the end of it."
The Guardian has also had problems with attribution lately. In a few cases credit hasn\'t been given to other publications when quotes have been recycled. You might have seen this correction: "An article about Adam Carroll, A1 Grand Prix championship driver, published online under the heading Adam Carroll aiming for formula one after A1GP success, 5 May, failed to acknowledge that the quotes from Carroll used in the piece came from an interview by Will Buxton published in the 4 May issue of GPWeek, an online magazine. We apologise for this lapse."
Or this one - also published this month - which dealt with another error: "A report of the trial of Muntazer al-Zaidi, who was convicted of assaulting a foreign head of state after he threw a shoe at George W Bush, conflated two court hearings held three weeks apart. Zaidi did not tell the court on 12 March: \'I saw only Bush and it was like something black in my eyes.\' Nor did he say at that hearing: \'I had the feeling that the blood of innocent people was dropping on my feet during the time that he was smiling and saying bye-bye to Iraq with a dinner.\' He made these statements at an earlier hearing, on 18 February. The quotes first appeared in an Agence France-Presse story."
Under the heading "Plagiarism" the Guardian\'s editorial code provides that information, including quotes, taken from another publication or broadcaster should be acknowledged. Bylines should be carried only on material that is substantially the work of the bylined journalist and articles that contain a significant amount of agency copy should credit the agency.
A correction is one thing, branding people with the P-word, is another. "Plagiarism" is a broad term covering a range of problems including slip-ups and sloppiness at the lower end of the scale and, at the top end of the scale, serious ethical breaches involving dishonesty and deception of readers. The urge to stick this reputation-damaging label on a writer every time credit is not given where it is due should be resisted. The P-word can really only be applied fairly when a writer has deliberately appropriated a substantial or significant part of someone else\'s work.
Is it ever acceptable not to credit another publication? The obituaries editor tells me that in obituaries quotes are not always credited to their sources because this interrupts the narrative. If obituaries are to be regarded as special cases, why not add footnotes or links to the text online to show where unsourced quotes come from?
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]en-dowd-plagiarism-accusations
