Oooo, the poor plagarists, the pressure made them do it
I am getting really, really, really sick of this sort of excuse/explanation:
“The problem [of plagiarism] is as old as journalism,” says Stephen Ward, director of the Center for Media Ethics at the University of Wisconsin. “It’s a systemic issue, it’s a case of extreme pressure being put on people. Newsrooms are hot competitive environments, and whether that’s on Wall Street or at The New Yorker, people may take chances to get noticed.”
Only if they’re unethical people in the first place. If you’re a writer and a person of integrity, you just don’t do it—not to get ahead, not to meet a deadline, not for any reason (except through error/carelessness, perhaps).
One of the very first things a young person learns in school when being taught to research a paper (or should learn; I’m not quite sure what they’re teaching any more) is that anything you borrow or quote must be attributed. When I was a kid, we were instructed in the use of a complex system involving little index cards and handwritten notes. The whole thing was very difficult to organize, and labor-intensive as well. Now such research is simplicity itself if the source is online—just cut and paste.
The newest case of plagiarism is by Fareed Zakaria, who has apologized and called it a “terrible mistake” and a “serious lapse.” Those are strong words, but ambiguous ones as well. Is he saying he didn’t know he did it, and it was a careless although serious error? Or is he saying he knew full well, and the “mistake” and “lapse” were moral ones? And if the latter, my question for Zakaria is: why did you do it, then?
And a reader who scrutinizes the passages Zakaria plagiarized might well wonder (as I did) whatever he could have possibly seen in them that would have tempted him to copy them. They are remarkably pedestrian, the kind of thing that could be found in a good high school term paper.
I must say, I don’t get it. Although it occurs to me that perhaps they were all students of the great Lobachevsky (as interpreted by Tom Lehrer, of course):
It’s not pressure; it’s laziness. I graduated with a journalism degree and remember very well the disgust in the department when two undergrads were caught plagiarizing THE DEFINITION OF PLAGIARISM. Yes, they copied an entire entry from a encyclopedia.
Then again, our professor of Ethics in Journalism was horrified by the answers of so many students in the ethical reporting scenarios. The instructor for Investigative Reporting had a Pulitzer for his exposé on corruption (and Gary Hart’s shenanigans) and he used to insist, “NEVER use an anonymous source. If the story is real, you’ll find someone who will give his name.”
So much has changed since the ’90s.
Tom Lehrer had a great future ahead of him and then he threw it away to become a mathematician. I still have records of his songs.
Zakaria probably learned in grade school that it’s ok to lie if you cross your fingers behind your back and thought this also applied to plagiarism.
Look what it did for Joe Biden. Steal a speech from Neil Kinnock, a few years later, Vice-President.
Seems kind of backwards to me. When I read a paper with attributed material, I like knowing the stuff has been at least slightly vetted instead of made up.
And if you’ve gone to the trouble to find it, what’s the problem of naming the source? Seems like not much trouble.
Perhaps the writers who do this like being thought of as having these brilliant insights all by themselves.
But. as neo says, Zakaria doesn’t even copy the good stuff.
I don’t get it.
Reading Rebecca West’s “The New Meaning of Treason” and “Train of Powder”, I get, ymmv, what seems like a really neat thought from her about every third page. What’s unique is that I think, ymmv, “I was just about to conclude that, too.” which makes it even more interesting.
I could see somebody wanting to achieve the same effect. But, hell, why not achieve it by attributing it?
OTOH, there are only so many combinations of words for things, limited further by rules of grammar, and any number of clever and uberapproriate sentences rolling around in the brain. I expect any writer worries about putting together a really neat sentence he or she doesn’t know or can’t recall that somebody else already did.
Paragraphs…. Almost impossible.
My Theory:
It’s hard to churn out a column regularly with nothing new to say, so you use an assistant. Your assistant gives you a passage describing what’s in an interesting book you can pretend to have read. You assume the passage is original writing by your assistant, so you feel free to use it. However, there was a misunderstanding: your assistant had copied the passage and did not intend for you to use it verbatim.
The second I read the article’s headline, I thought of Tom Leher’s “Loboachevsky.”So it doesn’t come as a surprise that Neo, another Tom Lehrer fan, thought of the same thing.
It is amazing how many of his songs can be linked to current events. For those of us who were once libs, his “Folk Song Army” hits the spot.
“only be sure to call it… research”
I do love Lehrer. Thanks for sharing that, Neo! More people need to hear his work.
Gringo. WRT folk songs. Trying to explain it to my kids who are in their early thirties.
Lots of the old stuff on youtube. I like the kind Lehrer doesn’t talk about—Kingston Trio, Brothers Four, or pieces other performers did which weren’t “protest” songs. I was never a lib, so I guess that’s the reason.
Except for the most commercial–which is to say the ones who hit the notes and whose lyrics rhymed and scanned–most performers would get a “protest” song or two into a concert or onto an album.
Everybody was protesting injustice in those days, or at least cutting class and throwing the frisbee around to show The Man they weren’t going to take it any longer.
Richard Aubrey:
Everybody was protesting injustice in those days, or at least cutting class and throwing the frisbee around to show The Man they weren’t going to take it any longer.
ROTFL. Your description is similar to Tom Lehrer’s lines from Folk Song Army:
At the time, I didn’t think the song was funny. Only when I realized what I fool I had been, years later, did I appreciate the humor.
Lehrer’s satire reminds me of one penned during my high school days in reaction to a group formed by the most popular person in the junior high: Young Citizens for Equal Voting Rights. This was the year of Selma. They were certainly well-intentioned. A columnist in the high school paper, a cynical friend of my sister, renamed the group, “We don’t have anything to do on Friday afternoons, so we’re gonna do it.” That did not go over well with the YCEVR. They should have felt flattered for being noticed by someone in the senior high. 🙂 [Junior and senior high were on the same campus.] The columnist was not being a Lehrer copycat, as he wrote the column before This Was the Week That Was got released.
Re old folk songs. Sam and Dave, who gained fame as a soul duo, started out as folk singers. Their repertoire was similar to Odetta’s. Unfortunately, I cannot locate their folk stuff on the web, and I don’t have the album with me- just the memory.
Gringo. It would be interesting to see when folk split off from country/blue grass, or wherever, and why.
There was a guy back in, iirc, the Thirties with the delightully appropriate name of Cisco Houston who collected what were supposedly folk songs.
While “Four Strong Winds” would be considered a folk song, it was an original back in the Sixties, so what, besides a modest guitar accompaniment, made it “folk”? The same could be said for dozens of solid songs still around as “folk”.
Riichard, I remember Cisco Houston from an album set of folk songs that my parents gave us for Christmas circa 1961. I played that set until it wore out. I later found out that Cisco had died that year, at the age of 42. He was a buddy of Woody Guthrie.
One of the songs Cisco played on that set was “The Cat Came Back.” I was already familiar with the song because a family friend played it on his guitar.
One difference between what we know as “folk singers” and country/bluegrass is that the “folk singers” often had a hard left political agenda. No, not every song they sang had a political agenda, but enough did. Woody Guthrie, the Weavers, Pete Seeger[yes I know he was with the Weavers]: Commies, all of them. Mary of Peter Paul and Mary was a red diaper baby.
The traditional country/bluegrass singers and performers did not have a political agenda. Woody Guthrie wrote the lyrics for “Sinking of the Ruben James,” about the German sinking of a US Navy ship in WW2. He took the melody from the Carter Family’s “Wildwood Flower,” transforming the non-political into the political. Cisco Houston sang “Sinking of the Reuben James” on the album set I mentioned.
Songs for John Doe, the first record release of the Almanac Singers in early 1941 comprised anti-war and anti-draft songs. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22,1941, the record company destroyed the remaining copies of Songs for John Doe. Anti-war before June 22 1941 and pro-war after that date: that is a pretty good criteria for hard core Commie or Commie symp- party member or not- regardless of how the guilty parties may spin it.
Who was in the Almanac Singers? Pete Seeger and Lee Hayes [Weavers] wrote two of the anti-war, anti-draft songs. Pete Seeger and Josh White were among the performers on their first records- the anti-war, anti draft songs. Other big folk names performed at one time or another with the Almanac Singers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmRA9k55dNg The Cat Came Back
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICy5P1pKy5A Sinking of the Rueben James
In the Lehrer video: I can’t parse the first review of his first book, but the second one (Izvestia) means, roughly, “I walk the same ground that the Tsar himself walked.”