Publisher’s Note: The publisher has had no role in editing this essay, which is published as the writer submitted it with the intention of publication in BEACONS.
By Angelica Melara
Plagiarism and fabrication are two things that a journalist, or any writer, should never do. These are major crimes in the journalism community that have to be met with strict consequences or else people will continue to break these unspoken rules of writing. Throughout this semester we have learned about various writers who have plagiarized or fabricated their work. We have also learned their reasonings behind their actions along with how these actions have impacted everyone involved and some solutions that have not successfully worked.
To understand why plagiarism and fabrication are bad, we have to first dive into what they are. In the first week of classes we were taught through Poynter’s course that the Oxford dictionary defines plagiarism as using someone else’s work and passing it off as your own. The Oxford dictionary defines Fabrication as the intentional creation of something like a quote, or scene setting, that is often used to advance the storytelling in an article. Each of these journalism crimes are ethically and morally wrong. We learn about this in other courses we have to take for journalism, and learn that it is ethically wrong to plagiarize things because it is theft, and the plagiarizer is able to gain something from plagiarizing. Fabrication is wrong because, as we have learned, there is a certain trust that is built around journalists and the people. If a journalist is caught lying to the people it shows disrespect toward them and shows that the journalist is not doing what is best for the people. Journalists are supposed to write hard facts about everything and give all of the information they have gathered to their audiences to make sure their audience is not left in the dark about anything. An example of this would be if there are problems with the government, journalists will be able to give all of the information to the public.
Mallary Jean Tenore explains in an article how college students actually react to hearing about all of the cases of plagiarism and fabrication within the journalism community. She further explains that this problem can stem from how journalism students are taught in school about how to cite or quote their sources. If students are not taught properly when they are first learning about how to quote people or cite their sources the issues of plagiarism and fabrication will grow into something even bigger than what it is.
We have learned about some journalists that felt the need to come forward and tell someone that they had fabricated something. An example of this would be Nik Cohn and his article “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night.” This story was fabricated and Cohn hadn’t come clean until 20 years after the publication date. Cohn is a good example of how some writers will eventually feel guilt for what they have done which makes them want to come out and say something about what they’ve done. He was one of the journalists that we looked at this semester that seemed to not have many consequences to his actions. He became successful because of his story and was not fired or looked down upon in the business. He did face setbacks of people not trusting him but his success is something that might have made others believe they could get away with doing the same thing.
Someone who’s success took a turn for the worst after it was discovered that his story was fabricated is Sir John Herschel. Herschel wrote about The Great Moon Hoax, and many people believed him when he told the public that different animals and creatures that looked like humans with wings were inhabiting the moon. This shows how the trust that had been built between the public and the journalism world was broken. After people found out that these creatures were not real, it made the public question what else the media had been lying to them about. Herschel is a journalist that shows how spreading false information to the public is ethically wrong. To try to help his case and make it seem less bad than it was, Herschel decided to say that his writing was satire, although there is no reason why the public would have forgiven him for what he did. He knowingly lied to people and then tried to cover it up which is something that can’t happen when it comes to fabrication and plagiarism.
When it comes to facing punishment for their actions, people are treated differently. It is important to take the factors of each case into consideration, but it is also important to understand that people should be held accountable for their actions. An example of people being treated differently based on who they were and the friendships they had formed is focusing on Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith. Mike Barnicle’s employer’s loyalty to him was something that is something we saw taken into consideration after studying his case. Barnacle had stolen jokes for Carlin, or as he put it, “got them from a friend,” and presented them as his own. This is plagiarism because he had taken someone else’s ideas and used them as his own which he then prospered from. Howell Raines wrote an article talking about the inequality in Barnicle’s case and says that Barnicle’s popularity “...says to young journalists that the contract of trust that we ask them to sign - about what they write and what they tell their editors - is not really absolute or equally enforced.” What Barnicle did teaches young journalists that it is okay if they are popular to do what they want and take other people’s ideas because if they are popular they won’t get in trouble. In the same article, Raines also says that Barnicle “is a product of a male-dominated, mostly white tribal culture that takes care of its own.” This sentence is very true and is something that has to be now taken into consideration when it comes to plagiarism and fabrication because a person’s punishment should not be based on their gender, their race or anything else other than their actual crime.
Barnicle did not really have much to say about owning up to his crimes whereas Patricia Smith did. Smith came out with an apology where she said, “I wanted the pieces to jolt, to be talked about, to leave the reader indelibly impressed. And sometimes, as a result of trying to do too much at once and cutting corners, they didn’t. So I tweaked them to make sure they did.” What Smith did is not excusable but she did make it a point to try to explain to people why she did what she did. Her reasoning for fabricating parts of her stories is something that is a reason for most other journalists that have been caught fabricating. The need for wanting to be a good and captivating writer is something that every journalist feels. Journalists want people to read their work and be moved by how they are writing, but adding information to make the writing better is not something that is okay. Smith resigned from her position at the Globe after she was caught and asked to find the people that she had created for her story. In the article, “Admitting fabrications, Globe columnist resigns,” it says “ He handed her the names of six people asking her to locate them and document their existence. Over the course of a two-hour discussion, Smith acknowledged that only two of the six names listed were of real people.” Smith did not come forward and say what she was doing but after she was caught and was feeling the full effects of her mistakes, she then tried to explain herself.
After listing some of the journalists that have been caught plagiarizing and fabricating their work, and talking about what plagiarism and fabrication actually are, it is time to talk about the different stakeholders and how they are impacted. These stakeholders include the journalists themselves, the publications, the readers, journalism as a whole and our democratic society.
The journalists are the main stakeholders. They can either come out and say what they have done or they are caught fabricating and plagiarizing and have to deal with the consequences. These consequences can involve having to leave their jobs, which means they are either fired or they resign, never being able to write again or just getting a slap on the wrist. In some cases it is understandable that people have mistakenly plagiarized. The internet is such a wide space and is a place where people can share their ideas. It is also possible to plagiarize yourself, so all of those factors have to be taken into consideration when looking at each case. After any case of fabrication or plagiarism, a writer’s reputation takes a big hit. This is something that can be seen in the case of Ruth Shalit. Ruth Shalit was a writer for the New Republic. She was suspected of “confusing” other people’s writings as her own and using the information in her pieces. There were many cases of this happening and after everything the excuses that she was making for her actions were not taken seriously. In the interview with Shalit titled, “Too Much Too Soon,” Shalit tries to explain what was happening from her perspective. She was trying to convince people that knew she messed up that she did not plagiarize anything that she wrote. She tries explaining that everything was “just an accident.” She tried to salvage her reputation but after a stunt like that, it is hard to come back and have people actually trust you again. She stuck to her story about how all of the information was hers and how she did not plagiarize anything but that is just false, and her case shows that some people don’t care about actually admitting when they did something wrong. Shalit was also given multiple chances and opportunities to fix her mistakes but she never did which is something to look at.
Steve Hall was a journalist who was suspended after he submitted a plagiarized article to his editors, and about a month later he was “dismissed.” Unlike Shalit he was not given any other chance to make a change and learn from his mistakes, he was just fired. Holding people to the same standard is something that should be taken seriously when looking at each case of plagiarism or fabrication. As people who are studying journalism in hopes of becoming the best journalists that we can be, we learn that it is never okay to plagiarize or fabricate but when we actually learn about journalists that have done this in their career and have gotten away with it, it becomes a confusing topic. When is plagiarism something that is taken too far? When is it actually going to be taken seriously? These are things that start to get confusing because there are some people that can continue to write and become better journalists because they are learning from their mistakes or not learning at all and continuing to make the same mistakes and there are other journalists that lose everything. When plagiarism or fabrication cross someone’s mind, they should understand the certain consequences they are looking at. This is why there has to be a certain standard of punishment when it comes to fabrication and plagiarism.
When a person fabricates and plagiarizes they are not only putting their own careers on the line but they are putting their publications at risk as well. They sometimes fail to realize that they are not the only ones that have something to lose. The publications certainly do not want to be the ones that are known for having their writers lie to the public, and it is different for each publication, however the publicity from a scandal such as plagiarism and fabrication is something that each publication should be scared of. This is another reason as to why there should be a certain standard of how people should be punished when it comes to them plagiarizing or fabricating.
Jayson Blair was a writer for the New York Times, and because the New York Times did not take the time to look at Blair’s previous work in college, it led to their embarrassment of having Blair work at the Times for five years while he was plagiarizing and fabricating a lot of the material that he was putting out. Blair was hired at the Times after having been an intern during college. The article “Jayson Blair: 10 years later, part 1,” talks about how Blair was editor-in-chief at his college’s student newspaper, The Diamondback. The article talks about how when Blair was working for The Diamondback he was hated by a lot of his staff, was lazy and inconsistent with his work and how he told a reporter to write a story about the rumors circulating a student’s death on campus that turned out to be false. These were red flags that the Times had not seen before having hired Blair which would eventually lead to the coming embarrassment that would fall upon the Times because of their neglect of doing a background check.
In “Jayson Blair: 10 years later, part 2,” it talks about how students would complain about Blair and all of the complaints were not resolved. The college neglected to do anything about the complaints even though there were many students coming forward talking about how bad of an editor-in-chief Blair was. The neglect stemmed from the college thinking Blair was an amazing writer, and they wanted him to succeed because the college wanted to look good. Blair’s teacher’s did not mention what happened at the college to the Times and this was neglect on their part because as journalists they are creating another journalist that they know is breaking journalism rules and letting him be a bad journalist.
In the last part of the series, “Jayson Blair: 10 years later, part 3,” it explains how the lack of consequences that Blair saw from his actions caused everything to spiral out of control. His mistakes and carelessness ended up getting two other people fired. The two people that had gotten fired were managing editor Gerald Boyd and executive editor Howell Raines. Both of these people brushed Blair’s actions under the rug and did nothing about it. They deserved to face consequences as well because they were the ones in charge of Blair and they were allowing him to do whatever he wanted. Blair had only decided to resign after another journalist had read his work and thought that it sounded too familiar. In “A Journalist’s Hard Fall,” readers are told that a San-Antonio Express News writer had seen Blair’s article in the Times and saw that the words were almost identical to the words in her article. This is the moment that the Times, after years of him fabricating and plagiarizing his work, finally decided to start questioning Blair and asking for him to show the proof of how he was able to write this story. He was not able to do so for obvious reasons and later resigned.
Blair wasn’t held accountable and it blew up in everyone’s faces. The Times was not trusted by the public anymore for having known what Blair was doing, other journalists lost their jobs, and it showed other journalists that they’d be able to get away with something like this as well. Blair’s case is something that can also be used to describe how something like this can affect the relationship between the public and the media. As mentioned before, the public viewed the Times differently after finding out they did not do their research when it came to hiring someone, and after having discovered that this person was spreading false information to the public, they did nothing about it. There were no consequences that Blair had to face and this is something that made the public mad. It became a matter of whether or not the public should continue to trust the media. Journalists are supposed to be the bridge between what is happening in the world and the public. The trust that is shown to the public cannot be broken and with any instance where the public feels as though they are not treated fairly, the whole journalism community suffers. Each time another person is caught plagiarizing or fabricating information, it means that there is another reason for the public to not trust the media. The level of trust between the public and the media is something that is very fragile and is something that should not be taken lightly when it comes to deciding whether or not to punish someone after their wrongdoings.
Another stakeholder that has yet to be mentioned are the people in the stories that can have their lives ruined because of someone spreading misinformation about them. An example of this is Jack Kelley, a 21-year USA Today veteran who was found to have fabricated eight of his stories. He also could have drastically changed the life of a woman that he reported on for stating that she had illegally entered Cuba and used a picture of her. The woman was a legal Cuban citizen and because of Kelley’s fabrication of the story, she could have lost her job and imigration status. People that fabricate their stories sometimes fail to realize that they are changing the lives of the people around them, and that those people can end up getting hurt. Kelley can be used as an example to show new journalists how the spreading of false information can have a negative effect on the people. Kelley’s fabrication stemmed from the use of anonymous sources. He believed that since the sources wanted to remain anonymous that he’d be able to get away with fabricating the stories. This led to a new code of ethics and stricter restrictions on the usage of anonymous sources.
It is difficult to understand why people fabricate and plagiarize their stories, but at the same time it is important to try to understand why they do. As mentioned earlier, some people feel as though plagiarizing or fabricating their stories will make them seem like better writers. They want to captivate their audience, and that is understandable but there are so many different ways to do that. Taking what seems to be the easy way out by fabricating or plagiarizing is not a smart decision at all. There have to be stricter rules when it comes to the consequences of fabrication and plagiarism.
In the article, “Journalism has a plagiarism problem. But it’s not the one you think,” the author talks about how the journalism community is “consistently inconsistent” when it comes to how to punish acts of plagiarism or fabrication. It indeed is difficult to come up with a system because some cases may not be as severe as others, but it is important to tell people that if they plagiarize and fabricate that something specific is going to happen, whether that punishment includes them being suspended, getting a slap on the wrist, or them being fired entirely. People should be able to learn from their mistakes and it depends on how severe the case is to jump to the conclusion of taking them out of the journalism world forever. Some people go on to have even better opportunities than they had because of their writing and how they are able to bounce back from being caught plagiarizing and fabricating. Jonah Lehrer was caught fabricating quotes and plagiarizing his own work. It is a bit of a gray area when a person plagiarizes their own work because plagiarism is defined as taking someone else’s work or ideas and using it as your own, however, if you are using your own work, it is indeed your own ideas. Lehrer was shunned for what he did, but then released a book about his experiences. According to a Vanity Fair article, he clearly did not learn his lesson because he continued to use other writer’s ideas.
In the article, “The Plagiarist’s Dirty Dozen Excuses,” the writer talks about how when people are accused of plagiarizing or fabricating their work, they often stick to the same excuses. They will say they are overworked, have strict deadlines, do not intentionally plagiarize, become upset after the accusations, and will sometimes resort to being young and inexperienced writers. These excuses are definitely overworked and while yes, some of them may be true, it doesn’t dismiss the fact that what these writers did was wrong.
It is difficult to completely avoid plagiarism, and in one of the articles that we read, we were taught that there have been databases that editors can use to figure out if a person is plagiarizing. In the article, an editor had used one of these databases on his own article to find out that some of his work was plagiarized from his own articles. He was shocked because he did not recall plagiarizing nor did he mean to but the database told him that he plagiarized. Having something like this could be the first step into making sure people don’t plagiarize, however, editors have to put in the work when it comes to making sure what they are editing is actually not fabricated or plagiarized. Editors are the main line of communication between writers and the public, so no matter how much they trust their writers, they have to put in the work and try to contact all of a writer's sources to make sure the problem of plagiarism and fabrication within the journalism community decreases.
Comments