Friday, February 15, 2019

The Pages of Plagiarism

Jill Abramson, former executive editor of the NY Times, “has done something dishonest,” claims Nicolle Weeks, in an interview reported in the Times (Business, 8 Feb.) Weeks is the author of a 2005 Ryerson Review article that Abramson plagiarizes in her new book, Merchants of Truth. Michael Moynihan, a reporter for Vice News, is said in the Times to have tweeted that Abramson’s book contains “passages that appear to have been lifted from other sources, in some cases word for word.” Both Vice and the Times juxtaposed a pair of these virtually identical passages so that the plagiary was plain to see. But when Abramson appeared on Brian Stelter’s MSNBC show Reliable Sources (10 Feb.), and he asked her about the plagiarism, she denied guilt and said any plagiarism “is just your opinion.” A subsequent guest on Reliable Sources—a woman ethicist—said that any Times reporter who had done what Abramson did would “be fired.” Abramson’s bald-faced denial seems astonishing in view of her lifetime achievements as a reporter, editor, and author, and it recalls my days as a professor of English who heard the same sort of lies from students whose plagiarism was equally obvious. Fortunately for Abramson, the Times reports, her publisher, Simon & Schuster, will give her the chance to “fix” this and other problems “in future editions and in the e-book.”