What’s the difference between plagiarism and sloppy attribution? How do you define plagiarism?
An editor at one of the newspapers hosting an API Our Readers Are Watching seminar asked those questions recently. I promised to take a stab at answering them.
Let’s start with a definition and discussion of plagiarism. I would define it as substantial theft of someone else’s words or original research. Dictionary.com gets a bit more specific: “the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work.”
Merriam-Webster Online offers this definition of plagiarize: “to commit literary theft: present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.”
I should say for purposes of journalism that I don’t believe stealing story ideas counts as plagiarism. We would have few reporters or editors left in the business if we started purging those who use the basic ideas for stories from other media.
You see a story in another paper about a problem in that community and you decide to see whether your community is facing the same problem. No offense there. You see that the reporter from the other paper quoted a national expert and you call the same expert and ask similar questions and the expert gives similar answers and you quote what the expert told you. Still no offense.
Let’s say that you read the story and decided to check whether your community is facing the same problem, but you got busy and forgot about it. Several months later you hear from a source about the problem and decide to do your own story. While you recall the earlier story, you have long since lost the clip and do your own reporting. When you write the story, you use a phrase of a few words that is identical to a phrase used by the other reporter. Again, no offense. The theft was neither substantial nor intentional.
Memory is a funny thing. We store things we read and hear away in the corners of our minds and they come back up mingled with our original thoughts and writings.
In my handout for the session we do on attribution in our ethics seminars, I state that attribution is the difference between plagiarism and research. I don’t think that observation is original with me. But when I wrote it I Googled the unique phrase and the only hit I got was for an earlier handout I did on ethics. When I wrote the first handout, I don’t recall wondering whether the phrase was original with me. So maybe I just stole it from myself. But as I’ve wondered since, I am pretty sure I heard it in conversation or read it somewhere. Did I read it in a print source that isn’t online? Did I hear it in conversation or in a classroom or speech? I don’t know.
Lines like this become part of our personal and original presentations and writing. What is a cliché, except a line we have stolen from each other so many times that its origin is obscured and its meaning diluted? Even if the line’s not original with me, my use of it isn’t plagiarism because it’s not substantial or intentional. (And it’s not a clichés yet, or I’d find more hits on Google.)
When I do my “Grammar Matters” workshop, I preface with general credit to Michael Gartner, whose Words column I edited at The Des Moines Register in the 1970s as a young copy editor (and read for several years afterward). I learned a lot from Gartner’s columns and while I didn’t keep copies or memorize passages or columns, I tried to commit his points to memory. I wanted to use words correctly.
I have a good memory. I have no doubt that I use some of his exact words and phrases today in explaining points of language. I may do the same with Pat O’Conner’s “Woe Is I,” another terrific grammar resource, which I also credit in doing that workshop.
We are all influenced by those we learn from and our writing should and will reflect those influences. We can’t help that.
But what if your story includes a couple paragraphs that are identical or nearly identical to passages in the story from the other newspaper? What if you didn’t talk to the same source as the other reporter, but just lifted quotes verbatim from that story, with credit to the expert but not the newspaper? In either case, the theft has become substantial. That makes it plagiarism regardless of intent.
Intent matters, but I don’t think it defines plagiarism. For one thing, intent is harder to gauge than result. And for another, nearly every journalist accused of an ethical breach blames it initially on sloppiness or carelessness. Many journalists have lost their jobs for failure to attribute, whatever you call it.
I don’t think you can steal whole quotes or whole passages from another story inadvertently. That is far less believable than that you would steal the quotes or passages and then lie about your intent when you’re caught. If you steal substantially, your editors and colleagues will presume that you did it deliberately.
I may have a phrase or two from Gartner tucked away in the recesses of my memory that I can’t distinguish from his columns and my own reflections on language. But I didn’t memorize long passages of his columns and couldn’t recite them verbatim deliberately or inadvertently. In my youth, I did memorize Bible verses and the Gettysburg Address and a lot of the Declaration of Independence. I memorized all the lines of Petruchio when I played him in a high school production of “The Taming of the Shrew.” I couldn’t write any of those lines without recalling the source, or at least without recalling that I had memorized them from someone else’s writing.
I hesitate to draw a distinction between plagiarism and sloppy attribution. I agree to do so for two reasons:
The presumption of innocence is an important part of American values. While I think journalism ethics should hold stronger standards than criminal courts, I don’t object to allowing a presumption of innocence at some level.
Certainly plagiarism can have degrees. For the most part, sloppy attribution is to plagiarism as manslaughter is to murder. It’s a serious offense but not as grave.
I can think right now of four kinds of attribution failure that I wouldn’t classify as plagiarism:
Going back to that story idea you got from another newspaper, let’s say you openly cite that other story at one point when you’re quoting the expert and later on you quote the expert again without citing the paper. That clearly shows that you intended to credit the other paper. You could argue that the first attribution implied that all quotes from that expert came from the other paper. That’s something about which honest journalists could disagree. Your editors could insist on full attribution every time you use something that’s not original reporting and you agree to do that in the future and no harm is done.
At some point, facts reported exclusively by a news organization move into the public domain. For instance, the Washington Post reported the CIA’s use of secret prisons overseas and initially other stories needed to attribute that to the Post. Now we can report that as fact. Honest journalists could disagree about when something moves from exclusive reporting to common knowledge.
Some journalists use vague, passive attribution that acknowledges it isn’t original but fails to attribute properly. You know how we do it – “press reports,” “are believed to be,” “was expected,” “reportedly.” OK, that’s not sufficient attribution, but it’s not plagiarism either.
In rewriting a press release, honest journalists can disagree about how to credit the company and how much rewriting is enough. Maybe the reporter says the company announced such-and-such and the editor thinks the reporter should say “in a press release.” (Substantial theft of whole passages of a press release is no different from substantial theft from another source. It doesn’t matter that the organization offered the press release for publication and welcomes your verbatim publication. The obligation to be original is an obligation to readers, not just sources. Consent of the source doesn’t override that obligation to readers.)
Perhaps you could call first-offense plagiarism sloppy attribution. You catch a reporter stealing substantially from another source and the reporter pleads sloppy work on deadline. You’re skeptical but the passage falls somewhere between the blatant theft of multiple passages and the inadvertent repetition of a phrase from the distant memory bank. You’re willing to give the presumption of innocence to a good reporter with a good track record.
I spoke recently with an editor who caught a reporter attributing sloppily. The editor is satisfied that the reporter, who was fairly experienced, was honest but needed and welcomed a bit of education about proper attribution. I trust that editor’s judgment and welcome the education of reporters whose ethics education had a gap.
Most of the time, I feel less charitable. I believe that honest journalism covers a vast amount of territory and plagiarism covers a disturbing lot of territory. Sloppy attribution is a pretty thin strip of land between them where every plagiarist claims to live, so I’m suspicious of anyone making that claim. No honest journalist wants to live there. If you find yourself there, you need to make a top priority of ending your sloppy ways. That excuse works once, if that.
We’ve had enough high-profile plagiarism scandals in journalism of late that I don’t think anyone can claim sloppiness with much credibility. We all know the price of plagiarism: You lose your job; your offense is publicized in Romenesko, the sex-offender registry of journalism ethics (I wondered if that phrase was original, too, but couldn’t find a previous use when I Googled it); your career may be over.
Given those stakes, I’m willing to call small-scale plagiarism something less damning and punish it with something less than the public flogging that has become standard.
But given those stakes and all that attention to the issue, I find it hard to believe a journalist would copy and paste from another source without first putting quotation marks and attribution into the story (as I did when I cut and pasted the plagiarism definitions above).
If someone pleads sloppy attribution, I would thoroughly research that reporter’s past stories and thoroughly vet future stories. I’m skeptical and I’m not cutting much slack.
Our credibility is precious and a sloppy journalist is hardly better than a crooked journalist.
obligatory link to source material. thank you, thank you.
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