Flinging the p-word

A fill-in columnist for the Globe's Jeff Jacoby is hit with bogus charges of (you guessed it) plagiarism.

by Dan Kennedy

YOUNG unfairly accused of plagiarism.

It was the sort of development that has become as predictable and inevitable as a summer thunderstorm. Just three days after Boston Globe editorial-page editor Renée Loth named two temporary replacements for suspended columnist Jeff Jacoby, one of them was hit with a very public accusation that she had committed plagiarism.

This time, however, the Globe got lucky. The charges against Cathy Young, a columnist at the Detroit News and a research associate at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, turned out to be almost entirely bogus. Nevertheless, allegations that Young had plagiarized became, briefly, a national story, at least within media circles. This leads to a couple of observations.

First, the charges against Young show the extent to which the Internet has changed the media landscape. The p-word was recklessly flung last Friday by Debbie Schlussel, a columnist for JewishWorldReview.com, a somewhat obscure conservative Web site. Schlussel's J'accuse was picked up immediately by the Poynter Institute's MediaNews.org, which is widely read by industry insiders. Young posted a response to JewishWorldReview.com later that day; this Monday, Schlussel and Young exchanged yet another round of charges and countercharges, the tone of which might best be described as "Did not! Did too!"

Second, the Globe, by virtue (if I can use that word) of its well-publicized ethical problems of the past few years, has become a magnet for this sort of thing. Jacoby became a cause célèbre after he received a strikingly harsh punishment -- a four-month suspension -- for writing a tribute to the signers of the Declaration of Independence on July 3 without alerting readers that he was drawing on similar pieces by Paul Harvey, Rush Limbaugh's father, and various anonymous essayists on the Internet (see "Don't Quote Me," News and Features, July 14 and 21). Although Loth argues that Jacoby's infraction deserved such a stiff penalty, it struck me (and numerous other observers, ranging from the Village Voice's Nat Hentoff to the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz) as a gross overreaction, as though Jacoby were paying for the sins of former columnists Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle, who were coddled for years before they were let go. Because Jacoby has become something of a martyr within conservative circles, his fill-ins -- Young and Jennifer Cabranes Braceras, a Boston lawyer and an aide to Dan Quayle during his vice-presidency -- can expect to be watched closely.

"We're now in this climate of hyper-scrutiny where every little unattributed assertion that you might have made five years ago is now coming back to haunt you," says Young. "You do get into these murky areas of attribution. It just gets very complicated." Adds Loth: "The Globe is a big target, and we've always been a target of criticism. And we just have to believe in the actions that we take. We believe that we did the right thing regarding Jeff's column. And we just have to expect that this is going to happen."

Schlussel's charges are scarcely worth the space it takes to examine them. To be brief, both Schlussel and Young (not to mention a number of other columnists) wrote commentaries about a study showing that college students know more about Beavis and Butt-head than they do about American history. Schlussel was offended that Young, like her, made a reference to Fourth of July barbecues and to the hoary Santayana dictum that those who can't remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Plagiarism? Get real. Rather, whack both of them for reaching for the easiest clichés available.

In a second instance, Schlussel accused Young of lifting research about the alleged bullying tactics of the American Bar Association that had originally appeared in a USA Today editorial. But Young did not present that research as her own handiwork, and in any case used it to bolster a column about a completely different subject. Should she have credited USA Today? Probably. But op-ed columnists make unattributed factual assertions all the time, and the matter of when to attribute is unclear at best. Duane Freese, who wrote the USA Today editorial, points out that both his paper and the Detroit News are owned by Gannett, and that writers often make use of work within the chain without attribution. "It gets a little fuzzy," says Freese. "I don't attribute everything. It's impossible. You end up attributing every line." But he adds, "It is fairly obvious she's read the USA Today editorial and taken information from it. Some of the phrasing is similar. So it would have probably been better had she attributed it to USA Today."

Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, reviewed Schlussel's accusations and concluded that Young was in the clear -- although he, too, believes she would have been wiser to credit USA Today. More important, he thinks that editors should clarify their policies on attribution so that writers have some easily understood guidelines to follow. "I think that's the right thing to do when there's such a poisonous environment," he says.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.dankennedy.net

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy@phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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