THE FORUM; Philip Meyer holds the
Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill. He is also a consultant for USA TODAY and member of the newspaper's
board of contributors.
Journalism standards are changing
-- and not always toward recklessness. Here is one that's getting tighter.
From 1927, when it first adopted
a code of ethics, until 1984, the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ)
had no written rule against plagiarism.
C.D. MacDougall, whose 1938 book
Interpretative Reporting was once the standard text, advised concealing
the source of rewritten material in order to make it seem original.
Newspapers don't steal important
stories without verifying, he said, but they "do borrow for rewriting purposes
and often without waiting to verify minor items."
Today, the SPJ code warns: "Never
plagiarize." But the definition of plagiarism is unstable. Stealing large
blocks of text is clearly wrong. But what about stealing an idea, a joke
or an anecdote?
Recent cases show that any of these
can get a writer into trouble.
An editorial writer for the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch was publicly reprimanded by his editor last October for using
a hoary medical anecdote without crediting The New York Times, where he
found it the previous week. But did the Times own that anecdote?
Times contract writer Sandra Blakeslee
had led her report on the placebo effect in medicine with the case that
was "known to many doctors." It described a patient at the Long Beach,
Calif., Veterans Administration hospital, whose cancer symptoms disappeared
after administration of a placebo. The only source named was "Dr. Philip
West." He died in 1966.
The same anecdote had appeared three
years earlier in the 1995 book Remarkable Recovery by Caryle Hirshberg
and Marc Ian Barasch. As their source, they cited Bruno Klopfer's 1957
presidential address to the Society for Projective Techniques in New York
City. Blakeslee says she used the same source.
The speech quoted part of a personal
letter from West describing the case. It sounded less like clinical documentation
than a dramatic tale, e.g. "the tumor masses had melted like snow balls
on a hot stove."
The St. Louis writer took no large
blocks of text from Blakeslee, although he did appropriate her punch line
to describe what happened when the patient lost faith in his placebo: "He
died two days later."
Five words stolen. The rest was use
of the idea and an anecdote so old and widely circulated as to be in the
public domain.
More recent evidence of the change
in standards since MacDougall comes from a case in which a young writer
for CNN's on-line financial service took an idea from the Dec. 15, 1998
Wall Street Journal. She stole no blocks of text, but she did use Jonathan
Clements' idea and his structure while adding some new information and
fresh figures of speech.
For example, Clements used an automobile
metaphor to describe his proposed steps for new investors: "Get out the
map. Start your engines. Accelerate slowly. Hit the gas." The CNN writer
invented a parallel swimming metaphor: "Gauge the depth. Dip your toes
in. One limb at a time. Take the plunge."
She was fired.
Another standard applied when The
Wall Street Journal was the perpetrator. Writer Daniel Costello had compiled
an appealing list of food festivals across the USA.
Some of the material was similar
to listings in Barbara Carlson's 1997 book Food Festivals: Eating Your
Way from Coast to Coast. Here is an example.
Costello: "Although Georgia now ranks
third in peach production (behind California and South Carolina), it still
holds on to the title of the 'Peach State.' "
Carlson: "Today, Georgia ranks third
in peach production behind top-ranking California and South Carolina. But
Georgia officials insist that peaches have long been synonymous with Georgia,
and that Georgia still holds the title as the 'peach state.' "
Costello never cited Carlson, even
though she had express-mailed a copy of the book at his request. When her
publisher's publicist asked for a follow-up credit, she got a dismissive
lawyer letter. Costello's penalty was a dart from Columbia Journalism Review.
Finally, there is the famous case
of Mike Barnicle, the former Boston Globe columnist who lost his job over
several issues, including stealing jokes from a book by comedian George
Carlin. The borrowings were rewritten and cleaned up for a family newspaper.
Again, the problem was not stealing
exact words, but idea and structure. Barnicle now writes for the New York
Daily News.
One of the basic rules of fairness
in our culture is that a person should not be punished for acts that were
not against the law at the time they were committed. But morality is socially
defined, society changes its mind, and we don't all learn about it at the
same time.
Director-screenwriter James L. Brooks
expressed it in a line for William Hurt, playing a reporter in the 1987
movie Broadcast News. Accused of crossing an ethical line, Hurt says, "It's
hard not to cross it. They keep moving that little sucker, don't they."
In MacDougall's day, the line didn't
move much. Information was scarce, and recycling maximized its use. Today,
originality is more important.
And plagiarism is easier to spot.
Similarities in the work of different
authors get caught because technology helps information break out of once-closed
networks. People with an interest in a narrow topic are seldom content
with a single source. They use the Internet to search and compare.
So how should we journalists protect
ourselves from charges of plagiarism? We should think of everything we
write as part of a hypertext network and reveal the connections. Name sources
with enough detail so that readers can find them. Use print titles and
Internet addresses liberally.
Multiple and explicit sourcing is
not merely honest. It's a friendly bow to the way consumers use their information
media today.
[Illustration]
GRAPHIC,b/w,Sam
Ward,USA TODAY(Illustration)