ethics

Eight Reasons Plagiarism Sucks

It harms readers, in its heart beats a lie, it corrupts, and five

more.

By Jack Shafer

Readers have stormed my inbox, accusing me of "picking nits" in the latest of my two columns

about the plagiarism of New York Times reporter Alexei Barrionuevo (Feb. 27 and March 5).

One reader found my charge "hyperactive." Another insisted that Barrionuevo's lifting from

Bloomberg News was akin to "repeating the bus schedule," hence no foul. Another ridiculed me,

saying I exist inside an "echo chamber" of journalists, academics, and bloggers who "care about

this crap."

As I read that last note, I realized that I needed to explain in detail why plagiarism matters and

why journalists, academics, and bloggers are right to care about it. In order of importance, here

are my eight reasons plagiarism sucks:

It swindles readers. One of my correspondents mistakenly thought that what disturbed me most

about plagiarism was that it robs other writers of their labors. That's the least of my problems.

Plagiarism burns me up because it violates the implied warranty that comes with every piece of

journalism. Unless qualified with citations or disclaimers such as "compiled from wire reports,"

news articles are supposed to be original work.

When a reporter appropriates the words of another without credit, he gives the reader the

mistaken impression that he has independently verified the primary facts in his story. So, if the

first reporter got stuff wrong—dates, names, places, events—the lazy and corrupt second

reporter will end up cheating the reader out of the true story.

(Plagiarism aside, some editors discourage their reporters from milking Nexis for research not

because they worry about their guys pinching but because they worry about their guys

inadvertently retransmitting other guys' mistakes and clichés, setting them ever deeper in stone.)

Journalism is about truth, not lies. I cringe at writing those precious words, but like Samantha

Power, I've released them and can't yank them back. A reporter who abducts the work of another

reporter without giving credit tells a skeezy lie with every keyboard stroke. "I wrote that," he

lies. The plagiarist's fraud dissolves the trust between his publication and its reader; it injures the

reader (of course), the plagiarist's publication, the plagiarist's colleagues, and the plagiarist's

profession. (Good lord, am I starting to sound like a weepy Committee of Concerned Journalists

parishioner?)

It corrupts the craft. This is really a corollary of "Harms Readers" and "Truth, Not Lies." Every

plagiarism bust reinforces the view of readers and viewers who already believe the profession is

filled with lying, psychopathic scum. Bank robbers injure only the banks they rob. Plagiarists

injure the entire journalism profession, even the most scrupulous and honest of practitioners.

It promotes the dishonest. One path to journalistic success is productivity. Another is writing

deeply sourced stories. The industrious plagiarist combines both techniques, routinely out-

producing his colleagues with stolen, excellent copy. When the time comes to appoint a new

London bureau chief or a new deputy editor for metro, who is going to get the slot: the good

reporter or the supercharged, not-yet-apprehended plagiarist. Nobody will deny that rewarding

cheaters for cheating sucks. But again, the greatest injury isn't done to other journalists but to

readers. When the less-talented fellow gets the better job, the paper (or magazine or Web site or

broadcast) suffers, and that suffering is inflicted upon readers.

It denigrates the hard work of others. How often do convicted plagiarists or their apologists

attempt to blot away the plagiarists' crimes by saying, "Oh, the borrowing was trivial." Or, "That

was just a boilerplate story." They'll insist that there are only so many ways to write "Joe Doe,

the famous rope climber, died in his bed last night from a gunshot wound," and that such news

story similarities are inevitable.

The problem with the boilerplate excuse is that news stories written by nonplagiarists almost

never overlap the way the stories written by plagiarists do. I thought I made this point in my last

Barrionuevo story by publishing a sidebar that stacked the opening paragraphs from his "mad

cow" story against those from the Bloomberg story he lifted from and the accounts published by

the globeandmail.com and the Omaha World-Herald. Except for Barrionuevo, each

journalist quoted in the sidebar brought to the alleged boilerplate their unique news judgment.

If you think it's easy to write compelling boilerplate, just try.

It's not what we paid for. No New York Times subscriber should have to pay in excess of $600

a year for rewritten Bloomberg News copy.

It's not theft—it's something worse. Lots of people hate plagiarism because they consider it

theft. I'm not really a member of that party, even if I've used the words theft, stealing, crime, and

the like in my plagiarism columns. There is no crime called "plagiarism." If somebody publishes

an entire paragraph of mine without credit, you can't really say that he's stolen it from Slate. My

words can still be found at the same old URL, and the local sheriff can't charge the perpetrator

with felony theft even if he thinks the perp nicked my piece. (However, a word-thief can be

served with a civil complaint alleging copyright infringement, or if the pilfering is grand enough

a U.S. attorney may decide to charge him with the felony of willful copyright infringement.) *

The reason plagiarism is worse than theft is because the only real remedies for it are shame and

ostracism, both of which have proved very poor deterrents. Most plagiarists find a way back into

the business, as Trudy Lieberman reported in the Columbia Journalism Review.

It's vampiric. Before anybody points the plagiarism gun at me, please allow me to credit my

Slate colleague David Plotz with that witty formulation. "The plagiarist is, in a minor way, the

cop who frames innocents, the doctor who kills his patients. The plagiarist violates the essential

rule of his trade. He steals the lifeblood of a colleague," Plotz observed.

To put it in the modern vernacular, plagiarism sucks.

******

Go ahead, torment me with e-mail about the "anxiety of influence" at

[email protected]. And by the way, thanks again to all my Slate buddies who fed me

their best ideas. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in a future

article, or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned

by the Washington Post Co.)

Track my errors: Here's a hand-built RSS feed that will ring every time Slate runs a "Press Box"

correction. For e-mail notification of errors in this specific column, type the word Suck in the

subject head of an e-mail message and send it to [email protected].

Correction, March 10, 2008: The original version of this article erred in referring to a perp

being "charged with a civil complaint." No one can be charged with a complaint, only served. It

also mistakenly stated that all copyright infringement cases are civil cases. Willful copyright

infringement is a criminal offense. The copy has been corrected. ( Return to the corrected

sentence.)

Jack Shafer was Slate's editor at large. You can follow him on Twitter or email him at

[email protected].