TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/072991/0729220.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.8 KB | 82 lines

                                                                                PRESS, Page 59

Recycling in the Newsroom


Plagiarism at two major dailies raises anew the issue of a
newspaper's implicit contract with its readers


    Every schoolchild is taught the impropriety of claiming
credit for someone else's work. But in adult life, the rules on
plagiarism are often hazily understood, even by those whose
trade is to point the finger. Within a six-day span this month,
the nation's two leading dailies, the New York Times and the
Washington Post, confessed to plagiarizing stories from rival
papers and disciplined the guilty reporters, while the
journalism school at Boston University replaced its dean, H.
Joachim Maitre, after he lifted much of his commencement speech
from an obscure journal.

    Officials at all three institutions assured the public
that these were isolated episodes. But the misdeeds by the
reporters from the Times and the Post were simply more extreme
examples of corner-cutting practices that are becoming
regrettably common. Technology provides ever easier access to
other journalists' stories. Financial pressures impel sheer
productivity. Reporters see career advancement coming through
literary stylishness or Watergate-type exposes instead of
nuts-and-bolts checking. And editors at even the most prominent
places increasingly call themselves "packagers" rather than
seekers of news. Thus it is scant surprise that even experienced
reporters make bad judgments.

    Fox Butterfield of the Times went awry, ironically, in
reporting the Maitre plagiarism flap. After the story broke in
the Boston Globe, he retold it in a next-day version, more
elegantly written and with some fresh reporting. But Butterfield
had no reason to doubt the accuracy of the quotes in the Globe.
So instead of buying a videotape of Maitre's speech, as the
article implied he had, he took the quicker route of plucking
the words straight from the daily. He also borrowed the Globe's
choices for side-by-side comparisons of passages by Maitre and
PBS film critic Michael Medved. Butterfield presumably reasoned
his time would be better spent advancing the story by pursuing
new information. Instead, he was publicly rebuked in a Times
Editors' Note; he declined interviews last week while reportedly
on a one-week suspension.

    Laura Parker, chief of the Washington Post's Miami bureau,
took the shortcut principle even further in filing a piece
about mosquito and grasshopper infestations in Florida. She
lifted most of her reporting from stories by the Miami Herald
and the Associated Press, including direct quotations from
people she had not interviewed. She presumably saw little point
in the donkey work of calling the quoted sources, or hunting up
counterparts, to provide innocuous remarks. In the mind of her
editors, however, she broke an implicit contract with the
reader, in which the newspaper vouches that all its facts,
especially those surrounded by quotation marks, have been
checked for accuracy by the newspaper itself. So they fired her.
Parker declined to comment beyond a prepared statement: "I made
a mistake, which I deeply regret. My integrity and ethics have
never been questioned in my 16 years in journalism, and I think
I was very harshly punished."

    Whenever a news organ disciplines a reporter, cynics
suggest that management is seeking a public relations gesture,
a formal rooting out of sin. But the issue is the First
Amendment bond with the public. Plagiarism imperils that bond,
not because it involves theft of a wry phrase or piquant quote,
but because it devalues meticulous, independent verification of
fact -- the bedrock of a press worth reading.

    By William A. Henry III. With reporting by Minal
Hajratwala/New York