The taste of ink is getting old

Plagiarism is a funny thing. Like murder, it's an activity that, at a very young age, we understand to be hurtful and wrong. For anyone traipsing through standard K-12 schooling, as soon as you're old enough to write and use sources, plagiarism immediately becomes the most serious crime (and honestly, pretty much the only crime) that you can commit in the scholastic universe. Of course, unlike murder, it's possible to accidentally walk into plagiarism, seeing as the guidelines for what does and does not constitute proper sourcing can be confusing. (As a 24-year-old professional writingperson, I still sometimes get bogged down in the "do I need to cite facts?" quandary.)

The stakes -- at least while you're still in school -- are pretty high. Many, if not most, schools in the U.S. boast a "zero tolerance" policy when it comes to plagiarism: typically, it'll get you an automatic zero for the assignment; you might even flunk the entire class. For this reason, most schools have an explicit definition for what constitutes plagiarism, and it usually (and etymologically appropriately) boils down to "stolen words." For example, IWU's definition for plagiarism is: "the intentional or inadvertent misrepresentation as one’s own, the words, ideas, research data, formulae or artistic creations of another individual or collective body, without giving credit to the originator(s) of those words, ideas, data, formulae or artistic creations." Less loquaciously, my high school called it "9 or more consecutive words taken from another source without documentation."

Thanks to these kinds of policies, most of us come out of school with two major takeaways for how to be an honest writer: 1) stealing someone else's words is a really, really bad thing to do, and 2) plagiarism is a pretty black-and-white crime. Note the word inadvertent in IWU's policy. Copying is plagiarism, and if you do it, you're awful. End of story.

These takeaways are worth thinking about, particularly if you consider the fact that plagiarism scandals break out with some regularity in the Real World Media; it's an issue we run into well past high school and college. Do our school-taught sensibilities of what it means to be a moral/immoral writer serve us well when we confront grown-up scandals?

Recently, there were two different stories billed as "plagiarism stories" in the media, which is what got me interested in this whole issue:

Jonah Lehrer: A spunky, 31-year-old author and journalist known mostly for three popular pop-science books: Proust Was a Neuroscientist, How We Decide, and Imagine. He earned a bachelors from Columbia and was a Rhodes Scholar, after which he wrote for various publications before accepting a staff position at The New Yorker. A few weeks ago, he was accused of two different plagiarism-ish episodes: 1) he "self-plagiarized" material from some of his own blog posts, using it in "new" pieces for The New Yorker, and 2) he completely fabricated various quotes that he attributed to Bob Dylan in his book Imagine. After the charges came to light, Lehrer resigned from The New Yorker, but Wired magazine picked him up for their staff. More of his work is now being re-checked by publishers.

Fareed Zakaria: Highly respected author and journalist responsible for several books and for regular columns/segments for TIME, Newsweek, and CNN on politics, foreign affairs, and the economy. He earned a PhD from Harvard and has received various journalism awards throughout his career. A few weeks ago, it was discovered that a paragraph that Zakaria used in a TIME article (a paragraph that quoted a Constitutional Law professor on the history of gun control laws) had been lifted from another journalist. After suspending Zakaria and investigating the incident, both of Zakaria's employers (TIME and CNN) reinstated him, saying that Zakaria made an "unintentional error" and that it was an "isolated incident." While news of this scandal was breaking, Yale's school newspaper denounced him for the plagiarism, and so Zakaria resigned from his position as a board member at the university.

A close reader would notice the differences in these stories (fabricating vs. plagiarizing, a newbie vs. a veteran journalist, multiple vs. single infractions). But since they broke at around the same time and both involve writerly transgressions, many websites and news organizations discussed them both in the same breath -- they're both broadly understood as "plagiarism stories," and as such are treated as essentially equivalent, with both Lehrer and Zakaria deserving of being growled at for plagiarismy crimes. The New York Times was among the few who pointed out that, technically, Zakaria plagiarized while Lehrer is more accurately called a "fabulist." Having made this distinction, though, the writer, David Carr, is actually harder on Zakaria. Carr rebukes plagiarists for being "at bottom, lazy or sloppy" while he takes an almost empathetic stance towards Lehrer, who is young, struggling to shine as a writer in a competitive field, and is thus susceptible to fluffing up his work with lies.

That right there is the problem -- the reason why our secondary school plagiarism lessons are inadequate yardsticks for real-world scandals. Let's review the facts: Zakaria is an intensely intelligent and well-educated journalist who, after a spotless, decades-long career, has now been shown to be guilty for the first time of "unintentional" plagiarism. Lehrer is a popular writer who, even before this scandal broke, was criticized for publishing relatively ill-researched work, and has now been exposed for pulling quotes from Bob Dylan out of his ass. To add insult to injury, Lehrer squirmed around and lied for a while before fessing up to his wrongdoing. (Zakaria, for the record, took responsibility for his misstep right away.) The fact that these two incidents are being treated in the same way is annoying. That Zakaria's infraction is being branded as worse (presumably because it's plagiarism, which we're all taught to hate and fear, as opposed to Lehrer's harder-to-label crime) is absurd.*

I realize that there are, oh, probably two or three of us in the world who really get worked up about the amount of comparative disdain doled out to Lehrer and Zakaria, considering that both men are guilty of doing something wrong. But I'm going to go ahead and say it: If forced to choose, Lehrer deserves cultural Amish-style shunning way more than Zakaria does. If that isn't obvious, then it's a sign that we as a society need to be a bit more comprehensive when teaching our children what it means to be a trustworthy writer. Yes, plagiarism is very wrong, and it's important that we continue to scare kids away from it. But also I think it's important to send the message that "making crap up and calling it research" is an equally, if not worse, smarmy crime. 

Essentially, if a pair of stories like this one ever comes around again, I'd really like to see everyone cutting Mr. Decades-of-Honest-Journalism-Who-Made-A-Mistake a little more slack, and being substantially more critical of Mr. Obviously-On-His-Way-To-Being-Stephen-Glass.

* If someday it emerges that Fareed Zakaria actually is a lifelong plagiarist and has just been really, really good at hiding it for all of these years, then I'll eat my hat and retract this blog. But until that unlikely day...

Update: Wired magazine conducted an internal review of Lehrer's work (they hosted his blog, "Frontal Cortex," between July 2010 and June 2012) and found multiple instances of recycled work, plagiarism, fabrications, and/or factual inaccuracies. Wired has severed their professional relationship with Lehrer, and the journalist has now been pretty badly excoriated by at least one popular news/editorial site. Nothing new on Zakaria. It seems likely that I overreacted in the short term and that, in the long term, the media reaction is pretty appropriate to the crime(s).