New York Times Caught Plagiarizing
More of those multiple layers of editing and fact-checking the big media types are always on about.
I discovered the plagiarism while considering the Times article as a candidate for my “Stupidest Drug Story of Week” series. The unsourced assertion that paco was highly addictive because its high is short-acting struck me as suspicious nonsense. Plenty of drugs are short-acting without being highly addictive. A few Nexis stops later, I found the Herald piece.
Times Managing Editor Jill Abramson says that the piece’s author, Alexei Barrionuevo, concedes that he lifted the two passages. Barrionuevo had been working on the paco story for a couple of weeks and realized at the end of the process that he needed definitional passages about the drug to distinguish it from crack cocaine. She says that instead of consulting his notes, which he claims contained the information, he relied on Google. Indeed, a copy of the Herald story can be found via Google.
Barrionuevo doesn’t specifically recall taking the lines from the Herald story, says Abramson, but he doesn’t dispute that it’s very likely his source was the newspaper.
Did Barrionuevo commit plagiarism?
“Yes,” says Abramson. “I think when you take material almost word-for-word and don’t credit it, it is.” Like most employers, the Times doesn’t discuss internal personnel issues. Citing this policy, Abramson declines comment on whether a reprimand is planned.
A Times Editors’ Note about the incident is in the works, she says.
This reminds me of the time I caught the Fargo Forum ripping off entire paragraphs from a press release. Liberal defenders of the Forum have told me that it’s ok to lift stuff from press releases.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t think it’s ok to reproduce something someone else wrote - even if that someone is a press release writer - and represent it as your own.
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