Plagiarism: The Final Frontier

Well, damn, looks like for once the libs and lefty moonbats were right, and Ben Domenech is history at the Washington Post standing convicted of plagiarism in his not-too-distant past. I hate it when that happens. Michelle Malkin gives a pretty good wrap-up of the affair with useful links.

Wonk will still contend vigorously, however, that far more egrigious examples of plagiarism by lefty journos are uncovered and remedied with far less efficiency and force in the current environment. That doesn't make plagiarism right for either side of the aisle, but we need a little perspective here on the swiftness of justice.

Longer term, I begin to wonder whether writers, particularly the younger crowd, even fully appreciate just what constitutes plagiarism anymore. I recall grading college theme papers where students would just glue together direct and indirect quotes from other sources, sometimes attributing them, sometimes not. The notion, I guess, was that other people knew better than they did, so putting down other people's wisdom, attributed or not, was the best way to an A. I always had a hard time convincing them that writing a paper was an exercise in thinking for themselves, shoring up their arguments only where they felt they needed another source for evidence to back up their conclusions.

This sort of stringing along of unattributed or poorly attributed quotes may very well have been what Martin Luther King was doing in his own Divinity School thesis, which is now well-known to have chunks of plagiarized text. (For a niftily obscurantist reading of this, click here. For a more partisan view, click here.) Not to let Dr. King or anyone else off the hook, but I am just no longer certain how vigorously the immorality of stealing someone else's stuff and passing it off as your own is really taught these days in the lefty, relativistic environment that academia has become. With some exceptions, I wonder if the notion of plagiarism is taught in public high schools at all, or if that's been yet another thing crowded out by instructional sessions on the correct application and use of condoms.

Furthermore, the whole notion of plagiarism in this century has developed some interesting wrinkles, including some I never thought of. For example, a one-time dance critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, Octavio Roca, was hired away by the Miami Herald last year. So far so good. But a few months later, he was dismissed by his new employers. The charges? He plagiarized himself! Seems that Roca, who has actually had a distinguished career up to that point, filed away some of his tastiest prose bits and recycled them from time to time. This raises an interesting issue: Can you plagiarize from yourself? Now we're in a thicket, aren't we?

Novelists, prose writers, even poets, not to mention composers—Gustav Mahler comes to mind—frequently recycle their own stuff, sometimes from lesser works or magazine pieces. Rossini would recycle some of his favorite overtures and tunes from operas that had flopped into new operas. (Which is why the overtures to some of his operas don't have a single tune in them from the opera itself.) I am told (and perhaps this is just a legend) that when pressed for time when ordered to compose a new commissioned work, Bach once turned the score for one of his earlier works upside down and rescored it that way, thus producing a "new" work. Is this morally wrong? Probably not.

Where Roca appears to have crossed the line here was not necessarily in swiping his own stuff—in this he has a lot of company—but in swiping it from his previous employer under whom it was copyrighted and then redeploying it as "new" for his current employer. But then, this would appear to be more of a copyright violation than an instance of plagiarism, wouldn't you think?

Things get murky, too, in showbiz, where reporters or reviewers, frequently pressed by an impossible deadline for making the early edition of a newspaper, will borrow a few factual sentences from a PR flack's press release and plug it into a hastily constructed preview piece. The PR person invariably has the facts right, but has also put a bit of favorable spin into the piece which then graces the reporter's piece. But in this case everyone is happy. The editor has the piece on time, the writer doesn't get yelled at by the copyeditor for having the facts wrong, and the PR person in this case, is amazingly happy that his or her press release was plagiarized because that assures that the PR spin is now the newspaper's spin as well. What a world. (Of course, this is also why entertainment journalism has become increasingly unreliable of late.)

**********

Blogging is still pretty new to us here at HazZzMat, but we always endeavor to cite our sources, by links when we can find 'em. It's the right thing to do. As a writer, one sometimes regrets a competitor's brilliant turn of phrase, and there's always a fleeting temptation to appropriate it for one's own if one thinks he or she can get away with it.

Fact is, though, that this is morally and ethically wrong.

What we may be dealing with at this point in our writerly history is not only the wholesale trashing of ethical systems that have served us in good stead for many years. It is, worse, the replacement of these systems with a sort of "Looking Out for Number One" flavor of post-1960s situation ethics. (Yeah, and both of these are other people's terms, BTW, references to which I don't currently have.)

In yesterday's competitive writerly world, you'd try to beat the other guy by doing something better. More and more, it seems, in the writerly world of the 21st century, you now try to whack your fellow writers, in extremis, by swiping really good prose chunks from other writers who might not catch you at it. (You hope.) Perhaps this itself, in turn, is the product of a university environment where A-earning term papers are casually bought and sold so that lazy students can spend most of their time drinking beer while still copping a respectable B or C.

Plagiarism in writing. Steroids in athletics. Serial monogamy from Hollywood to Capitol Hill. Winning and fame have become everything, whereas how you achieve them seems to be less and less of an issue all around. So it's not surprising that in journalism, in addition to the by-now notorious cases of Jayson Blair at the NYTimes and Janet Cooke at the Washington Post, we should start seeing this behavior occurring on the right side of the aisle. Et tu, Brute? (William Shakespeare: Julius Caesar.)

Look, writers. Why don't you just cite the damned references, at least in passing? It's not a career killer. And furthermore, it may help re-introduce the old notion of graciousness back into the writerly world. Almost any piece written today, in all honesty, is built on the ancestry of hundreds of thousands of writers and chroniclers who've gone before. How is giving such sources a bit of credit going to damage your own brilliant career? Or if that concept doesn't move you, remember, too: there's now a legion of bloggers out in cyberspace that's ready to pounce on any prose transgression if you happen to piss them off enough.