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Friday, June 03, 2005
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A CLASS PRIMER: Red v Blue on Plagiarism Here are two writers who’ve both recently been plagiarized. The first is a sophisticated New Yorker writer who expresses his evolved views of the matter and attacks unevolved “plagiarism fundamentalists”: The truth was that, although I said I’d been robbed, I didn’t feel that way. Nor did I feel particularly angry. One of the first things I had said to a friend after hearing about the echoes of my article in “Frozen” was that this was the only way I was ever going to get to Broadway—and I was only half joking. On some level, I considered Lavery’s borrowing to be a compliment. A savvier writer would have changed all those references to Lewis, and rewritten the quotes from me, so that their origin was no longer recognizable. But how would I have been better off if Lavery had disguised the source of her inspiration? …[I]nstead of feeling that my words had been taken from me, I felt that they had become part of some grander cause…The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence…The final dishonesty of the plagiarism fundamentalists is to encourage us to pretend that these chains of influence and evolution do not exist, and that a writer’s words have a virgin birth and an eternal life. I suppose that I could get upset about what happened to my words. I could also simply acknowledge that I had a good, long ride with that line—and let it go. And here, from a redder state, is a Florida journalist: Dear Chris Cecil: Here's how you write a newspaper column. First, you find a topic that engages you. Then you spend a few hours banging your head against a computer screen until what you've written there no longer makes you want to hurl. Or, you could just wait till somebody else writes a column and steal it. That's what you've been doing on a regular basis. Before Tuesday, I had never heard of you or the Daily Tribune News, in Cartersville, Ga., where you are associate managing editor. Then one of my readers, God bless her, sent me an e-mail noting the similarities between a column of mine and one you had purportedly written. Intrigued, I did a little research on your paper's website and found that you had ''written'' at least eight columns since March that were taken in whole or in part from my work. The thefts ranged from the pilfering of the lead from a gangsta rap column to the wholesale heist of an entire piece I did about Bill Cosby. In that instance, you essentially took my name off and slapped yours on. On March 11, I wrote: I like hypocrites. You would, too, if you had this job. A hypocrite is the next best thing to a day off. Some pious moralizer contradicts his words with his deeds and the column all but writes itself. It's different with Bill Cosby. On May 12, you ''wrote:'' I like hypocrites. You would, too, if you had this job. A hypocrite is the next best thing to a day off. Some pious moralizer contradicts his words with his deeds and the column all but writes itself. It's different with Bill Cosby. The one that really got me, though, was your theft of a personal anecdote about the moment I realized my mother was dying of cancer. ''The tears surprised me,'' I wrote. ''I pulled over, blinded by them.'' Seven days later, there you were: ``The tears surprised me. I pulled over, blinded by them on central Kentucky's I-75.'' Actually, it happened at an on-ramp to the Artesia Freeway in Compton, Calif. I've been in this business 29 years, Mr. Cecil, and I've been plagiarized before. But I've never seen a plagiarist as industrious and brazen as you. My boss is calling your boss, but I doubt you and I will ever speak. Still, I wanted you to hear from me. I wanted you to understand how this feels. Put it like this: I had a house burglarized once. This reminds me of that. Same sense of violation, same apoplectic disbelief that someone has the testicular fortitude to come into your place and take what is yours. Not being a writer yourself, you won't understand, but I am a worshiper at the First Church of the Written Word, a lover of language, a student of its rhythm, its music, its violence and its power. My words are important to me. I struggle with them, obsess over them. Show me something I wrote and like a mother recounting a child's birth, I can tell you stories of how it came to be, why this adjective here or that colon there. See, my life's goal is to learn to write. And you cannot cut and paste your way to that. You can only work your way there, sweating out words, wrestling down prose, hammering together poetry. There are no shortcuts. You are just the latest in a growing list of people -- in journalism and out -- who don't understand that, who think it's OK to cheat your way across the finish line. I've always wanted to ask one of you: How can you do that? Have you no shame? No honor or pride? How do you face your mirror knowing you are not what you purport to be? Knowing that you are a fraud? If your boss values his paper's credibility, you will soon have lots of free time to ponder those questions. But before you go, let me say something on behalf of all of us who are struggling to learn how to write, or just struggling to be honorable human beings: The dictionary is a big book. Get your own damn words. Leave mine alone. P.S.: Chris Cecil was fired Thursday by Daily Tribune News Publisher Charles Hurley, immediately after he learned of the plagiarism. |