Plagued by the P-word
Richard L. Judd, president of Central Connecticut State University, retires today after four decades of serving the university in various roles. His extensive contributions, however, will be shadowed in part by the plagiarism that forced his resignation. Judd's problems made for a difficult semester at CCSU, where I teach journalism in the Department of English. We faculty got one of those "teachable moments" we could have done without.
Judd's situation was all the more painful to watch because the plagiarism he undertook was particularly mundane and easily avoided. In an op-ed that the Hartford Courant published on Feb 26, Judd used the occasion of the break-through in UN negotiations involving Turkish and Greek communities in Cyprus to write, in a tone of guarded optimism, about the future for inter-ethnic relations on the island. But this was not a case of someone writing about something far from his experience: CCSU has a relationship with Eastern Mediterranean University on the Turkish side of the island. Judd had visited the island many times, written academic papers, and lectured about the tensions among Cypriots. However, instead of a piece focused on his personal insights and experience, an approach that would have offered a fresh perspective, he put together a 700 + word piece with far too much historical background and info related to bureaucracy. And to accomplish this, he took material – the very words – from other sources, including a New York Times editorial and a government website out of Cyprus, among other materials. When he met with the CCSU faculty senate, he shared that he confused his own notes with notes he’d taken from these sources for a speech.
The plagiarism would have gone undetected if a reader, one whose sympathies are with the Greek Cypriots, had not spotted familiar phrasing and alerted the Courant, which alerted readers and subsequently ran Judd’s op-ed through plagiarism software, which found that 11% of Judd’s piece was “borrowed” from other sources and not properly attributed.
(Side-by-side comparisons of Judd’s work and the plagiarized sources are available, but it’ll take a little work to get to them. This link will take you to an unedited version of the column; there are links to some comparisons in pdf files).
My main interest isn’t in rehashing this bit of sad history, though it held special interest for me as a journalism professor and former op-ed columnist for the Courant; many people wanted to know what I would have recommended. Op-ed writers work in very tight spaces, and the general rule should be to avoid rehashing material anyone could offer. The editor should have requested a rewrite to draw on the unique perspective Judd did bring—and Judd should have taken better notes.
However, I am much more interested in the steady flow of plagiarism cases coming out of newsrooms these days. Earlier this week, a reporter at the Macon (GA) Telegraph resigned after it was revealed that he lifted outdated material from a website for a story he was writing about the circus coming to town. Damn! Reporters used to like to go out to cover the circus. Here are the first two paragraphs from the article in which the Macon paper announced the breach.
Telegraph entertainment reporter Greg Fields resigned Monday. His resignation came as we completed a review of his work on a story about the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus. The day that story was published, his editor received a call from a circus public relations official who said Fields had written about the wrong version of the circus that would be visiting Macon and that the story incorrectly attributed statements to a circus spokesperson.
Those accusations were serious enough, but a closer look at the story revealed that much of it came from the "Circus Report," described on the Ringling Bros. Web site as a "weekly newsletter for circus fans and professionals." The reporter said the circus spokesperson had referred him to the Web site for details and that he thought the material he used was from an official circus press release.
The disclosure was particularly upsetting in Macon, where editors had uncovered another plagiarizer just a few months earlier. As the article on Greg Fields notes:
What is troubling about this case is that it comes only months after Telegraph reporter Khalil Abdullah was fired for plagiarism. His plagiarism was extensive and it was easy to see how he did it; he simply had to search the Web to find a bounty of stories related to whatever topic he was pursuing. With Abdullah's firing came an opportunity to warn other reporters about the dangers of Web-based reporting. It's simply too easy to copy the work of another - inadvertently or not.
Cases like these have caused newspapers to purchase plagiarism software and tighten policies. Are there more journalistic plagiarizers in our midst today? There have always been miscreants in newsrooms. From what I know of journalism history, I'd say that concern with ethics has never been higher. The gross misdeeds of Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley have caused more editors to feel they need to come clean when such problems occur. And yes, the Internet makes it easier for lazy people to cut corners. As any professor who assigns a lot of writing can attest, many of us spend more time augmenting our grading sessions with Google searches these days. I bust a few people each semester. One of the more brazen instances occurred this semester: a student turned in this article as her own. I was suspicious from the first sentence's mention of a Samoyed; when I saw that the vet that my student was writing about lives in New Mexico (we're in Connecticut), I headed to the Internet to check things out. Yeah, the student did a little work: she downloaded the article into Word and put quotation marks around a few extra phrases to create more direct quotations (helps liven up the piece, you know). When I confronted her, she said she had no explanation except a feeling that her own work was not adequate. I told her that her effort would surely have produced something better than the “F” I had to give her
Plagiarizers in the newsroom do underscore some of the problems with laziness and shortcuts better than the more fantastical cases of Jayson Blair, Jack Kelley, and the very imaginative Stephen Glass. It is in the execution of ordinary routines that some journalists let down themselves, their publications, and the citizenry. I do not think plagiarism is as pervasive as other sins of commission and omission. By a sin of commission, I mean getting the facts wrong. Sometimes this does happen due the common practice of using information from other reporters' stories without checking those facts. Reporters may not steal other reporters words , but they do pick up “frames” (angles) on stories, and they do use facts from other journalistic sources without vetting them. (I actually think there are aspects of plagiarism here, though for purposes of this blog entry they are not separated easily from some of the "accepted" lifting from wire stories or news clips in the newspaper's morgue. Ideally, every fact in an article should be vetted independently, but this is not what typically happens, as you may have experienced if you have been the subject of a story that included an error that continued to get published by other reporters.) Sins of omission are an even bigger problem because we can’t account for what’s not there, what doesn’t even make the radar. As the Jayson Blair case unfolded at the New York Times last year, Steven S. Ross, a professor at Columbia University, took up the matter of everyday journalism shortcuts, from the poor use of numbers to limited questioning and legwork, as far more pervasive problems than acknowledged. He wrote:
The extent of the frauds committed by Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, and others makes them newsworthy. But their brazen lies hide an even bigger problem: Journalists often get the story wrong because we are too lazy or too stressed to check the facts. We take shortcuts and cross our fingers. Too many editors value good writing over exhaustive reporting even when, as at The New York Times, they have the staff resources to do both. In short, we often lie, or at least fib a little.
Much of the nation's public relations industry depends on writers taking these shortcuts. Our editors don't complain. Our publishers cheer us on. We may penalize journalism students and reporters for getting facts wrong, but almost never find fault with perfectly reporting the wrong story, a story fed to them by public relations officers or government leakers.
Ross gives concrete examples based on his research on how media handle news about the environment and other scientific and medical topics. I believe that most journalists try to do their best, but their “best” is necessarily restricted by professional protocols, time, resources, and limited knowledge of what it is they don’t know. Studies on media credibility show that people with firsthand knowledge of issues invariably find errors in news stories. While researching this blog entry, I came across an article on plagiarism software in American Journalism Review that starts by recounting the plagiarism case involving my college’s president. The reporter writes, “ The university reported, however, that Judd had lifted material from the New York Times, London's Independent and a Cyprus government Web site.” The university, however, was not the original source of this information. The Courant, a reader, and the plagiarism software located the original sources. This may seem like nit-picking to some, but the small mistakes add up and have consequences for society.
11:32:53 AM 
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