Plagiarism is on the rise—in journalism, by bestselling authors, on college campuses and online. But the one thing those of us victimized by it can’t do is speak up. If we do, we are accused of “sour grapes.” Occasionally, reporters who make things up (Jayson Blair) or copy from another newspaper (most recently New York Post reporter Andy Geller) do get… return to article
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Reader Comments (14)Page 1 of 1 pagesDo people like Ann Coulter supply the ideas and rough copy to their respective editors, who then actually “write” the books?
Posted by shopout on Sep 2, 2006 at 9:38 PM Susan Douglas makes an important point, that someone with a lot of clout may be able to get away with plagiarism, suffering only minimal consequences. Douglas cites her own case when she was a victim of plagiarism. Another example is Alan Dershowitz, who researched his book ,The Case for Israel, by “borrowing” (without attribution) from Joan Peters’ book, From Time Immemorial. Norman Finkelstein, a harsh critic of Israel, accused Dershowitz of plagiarism. Dershowitz aggressively denied everything, brazened it out, and emerged unscathed, except for his reputation. Meanwhile, two other Harvard law professors were caught in lesser cases of plagiarism and admitted it.
Dershowitz has some degree of immunity because of his close connections to the Israel Lobby. Few feel like taking him on.
Posted by Nevada_Ned on Sep 5, 2006 at 4:50 AM With the Internet enabling writers to seek out the most remote and specialized sources, plagiarism will get much worse. Few big-name non-fiction authors do their own research any more. They employ teams of researchers and “fact checkers” who scour Lexis-Nexis, Dow News Retrieval, Google and the like, for others’ research, recast it in their own words and present it as original thinking.
Few of us have the time, resources or inclination to fact check or source check the stuff top-earning writers like Coulter use (Lexis, for example, costs $75 a day or $250 a week for credit card access to its news database). Publishers have teams of lawyers to check the accuracy of statements, but few care where the material comes from as long as there is no clear copyright violation. Some authors footnote everything (Thomas Frank’s “What’s the matter with Kansas, notes every source.) but most leave you with the impresion that the author’s knowledge is vast and that the ideas in the book are his/her own.
Posted by decampe on Sep 8, 2006 at 3:42 PM Thank you Ms. Douglas. It isn’t just in print that copyright protections are being eroded. Legislation is currently being proposed in the US Congress to severely limit what an artist, illustrator, or photographer
can recover in damages when their work is used without their permission by those with extremely deep pockets.
Thanks again.
Posted by stuart.hayes@noaa.gov on Sep 18, 2006 at 1:48 PM Loved the bug-eyed photo, and the caption: Coulter: a thieving wench! It’s true what they say “a picture’s worth a thousand words!” It seems sad, doesn’t it, that Ann Colter’s public behavior, and her plagiarized book offer such amazing evidence that folks desperate for truth and self affirmation will sell and buy almost anything.
Plagiarism is theft—duh, and we all know where that thread of thinking goes: Theft is greed in action—the ends justifying whatever means for stealing anything that simply doesn’t belong to me.
Too sad that all over our world we’re more into political correctness, being or blaming victims, jihads, crusades, and conservatives “owning” the truth than seeking it through respect and understanding. Too bad we’re more about playing cops and robbers than enjoying a walk in a meadow.
kate satchwill@carolina.rr.com
Posted by KKSKate on Sep 18, 2006 at 6:35 PM There’s a standard way to punish plagiarists fo the sort described above. (Phone-book compilers use it all the time.) Just build an interesting falsehood into your text, wait for the plagiarist to copy the error, and then, rather than expose the plagiarism, denounce the error.
What can the plagiarist say? “Oh, it’s somebody else’s mistake; I was just stealing”?
Posted by feld on Sep 18, 2006 at 8:55 PM Using Coulter’s photo to illustrate the author’s otherwise valid point was both unfair and politically suspect, as were the accusations against her in the first place. None of the purported “plagiarism” atributed to Coulter involved ideas OR expression, but rather prosaic statements of fact that could have been authored by anybody. I sincerely doubt that Ms. Douglas read them, or if she did, that she could argue with a straight face that they would have ever been mentioned in the same piece as the other examples in her article, were Coulter not such an easy and loathsome target.
Coulter ‘s borrowings were indeed technical plagiarism, using part of a source’s phrasing of a fact or statistic rather than her own re-phrasing, but this is more akin to simple laziness than “theft”...nothing of value was “stolen.” I’d say Douglas’s laziness in highlighting Coulter in her article was far more egregious laziness: using a borderline offense by a detested conservative hit-woman rather than finding a more illustrative example.
Posted by jackomarsh on Sep 22, 2006 at 3:57 AM Flanagan is a bad writer anyway. I remember when she was writing for Atlantic (Harpers, who can remember?) she wrote an article about mommying and had the summary of a movie she had just seen wrong, wrong, wrong. I doubt she had seen it at all—I did write to the magazine about it but never heard from them. I think anyone—any publication she writes for should be very careful fact checking!!
Posted by marglew on Sep 22, 2006 at 2:12 PM Wrong, jackomarsh. Technical plagiarism is as damaging as intentional plagiarism. We have to be able to read a writer without wondering how sloppy or diligent—or how dishonest or honest—she is, else the balance of the reader/writer economy slip in the writer’s favor and the reader always fear that errors (sloppy or dishonest) enter the transaction.
On the other hand, the photograph is indeed too much.
Posted by jds2006 on Sep 24, 2006 at 7:45 PM What? One should ALWAYS wonder how sloppy or diligent an author is, lest we take for granted that the Lawrence Tribes of the world (now there’s a true plagiarizer) are giving us their analysis rather than someone else’s. I don’t think that Coulter’s laziness is excusable, but you can’t be serious that copying a sentence that says “the sun rose at 6:46 AM” is in the same league of theft as copying one’s effective phrasing or original ideas. ALL of Coulter’s liftings were of the former variety, and there’s a reason why none of them would sustain a copyright violation claim. It just isn’t subtantive or significant. “Sloppy” is not the same as “dishonest.” There is such a thing as de minimis plagiarism, and that’s what Coulter has engaged in.
Posted by jackomarsh on Sep 24, 2006 at 7:55 PM I’ve printed and will save your comments, jackomarsh and increas_mather. Thank you for articulating valid points for additional consideration in and out of my classrooms. The “what does it matter” question is one I rank as most valid—like “telling a little white lie, or being a little bit pregnant” What difference is minimal to an election’s pollster’s plus or minus statistical propbability, what is a material difference in “creative” accounting, cheating on SAT’s or “finding IRS loopholes”. Situational ethics…thanks for making me think about it as we move toward national choices for leadership. Thinking—a measured but time consuming alternative to the absolutism of way too many of our institutionalized systems…government, education, religions, all the way to gangs,neighborhood scout troops and/or personal relationships. If time is money, is there ever “enough” to make plagarism “worth it?” Sadly, again, I wonder if “sustaining a copyright violation claim” IS the measurment pf choice for Ann and so many others in our litiginous, excessive, capitalistic culture. Oh—I still think the picture added the perfect visual summary to the writer’s intent.
Posted by KKSKate on Sep 28, 2006 at 7:46 PM So what should be done to those when there is no doubt?? A “welcoming” letter plagiarized by a school superintendent who, when asked about it simply stated that he just couldn’t put it any better than the letter copied!! What should the consequences be??
Posted by Warrensburg on Sep 28, 2007 at 12:00 PM I came to your site through a series of search engine missteps and I’m glad to have found you.
After considering your points in the article, I couldn’t help but blog about it <http://durhamregion.typepad.com/people> because it reminded me of a couple of situations where I personally know plagiarism exists.
It seems that people who do it are simply lazy. And likely, not talented enough to as “Warrensburg” says in his quotation of the superintendant who “just couldn’t put it any better.”
I do wonder though, who owns the photo of the “thieving wench.”
Shouldn’t the photographer’s credit appear somewhere, or did I just miss is?
Posted by valerie on Feb 25, 2008 at 7:38 PM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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