July 11, 2000
Recycling Shouldn't Be a Crime
By James Taranto, deputy features editor of the Journal's editorial page.
Journalists often preach about the need for high ethical
standards. But punishing someone excessively for a trivial
offense is no more ethical than looking the other way at serious
wrongdoing. That's a lesson the Boston Globe's editors need to
learn.
On July 3 the Globe published a column by Jeff Jacoby, in which
he described the fate of some of the lesser-known signers of the
Declaration of Independence. Mr. Jacoby later explained in an
e-mail that he had based his column on three similar essays --
one by Paul Harvey, one by Rush Limbaugh and one that has been
making the rounds on the Internet. He rewrote these essays,
consulting reference works and Web sites to correct errors.
Three days later the Globe published an "editor's note"
acknowledging that "aspects" of the column had "appeared in a
widely circulated e-mail message and on the Internet" and
criticizing Mr. Jacoby for failing to disclose this. Then, on
Friday, the Globe suspended Mr. Jacoby for four months without
pay and accused him of "serious journalistic misconduct."
The Globe's editors acknowledge that Mr. Jacoby didn't commit
plagiarism, an offense that consists in appropriating someone
else's words. So what exactly was his crime? The editor's note
declared that "Jacoby should have alerted readers that the
concept and structure for his column were not entirely original."
Indeed, he should have. It's always best to err on the side of
disclosure, and the column would have been more interesting and
timely if Mr. Jacoby had made clear that he was correcting
errors in an e-mail posting that many of his readers had no doubt
seen. (He did spell this out to his friends when he e-mailed
them a prepublication copy of the column.)
But does such an error of judgment really amount to "serious
journalistic misconduct"? Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post's
well-respected media reporter, doesn't think so. "I considered
this a minor matter and wasn't planning on writing a word about
it until the Globe hit Jacoby with the four-month suspension," he
told me yesterday.
Do the Globe's editors really expect their writers to "alert
readers" every time they avail themselves of a "concept" that is
"not entirely original"? If so, they are setting up an
impossible standard. Very few concepts are entirely original.
(Surely I'm not the first to point this out.) To take a random
example, The New York Times, whose parent company owns the Globe,
is publishing a long series of ponderous articles on "How Race Is
Lived in America." Was this an original idea? No, but it wasn't
until the 10th installment that the Times "alerted readers" that
the Akron Beacon Journal ran a similar series that won it a
Pulitzer Prize in 1994 -- and the Times did so only in the
context of an article about race relations in the Beacon Journal
newsroom.
Granted, the Times series doesn't rely directly on previously
published work, as Mr. Jacoby's July 3 column did. But even
rewriting the work of others is nothing out of the ordinary. My
first journalistic experience was a 1986 summer internship at the
Los Angeles bureau of United Press International. One of my
duties was to walk down the street to the L.A. Times every night
at 8:30 and pick up a few early copies of the next day's paper.
I'd take the papers back to the bureau, where an editor would
pick out an article or two for me to rewrite -- sometimes with
attribution, sometimes without.
The following year I had an internship at KNX, a CBS-owned news
radio station in Los Angeles, where I wrote scripts for anchors
to read on the air. Sometimes I did original reporting, but
mostly I rewrote wire copy, some of which the wire services
doubtless had rewritten from newspapers. The anchors never
alerted listeners that the stories they were reading weren't
entirely original.
Journalists routinely recycle enough to make any environmentalist
proud. So why is the Globe charging Mr. Jacoby with the
journalistic equivalent of a felony?
The paper has an embarrassing recent history of ethical lapses.
In June 1998 it forced columnist Patricia Smith to resign after
she acknowledged fabricating characters and quotes in four
columns. Two months later the Globe asked veteran columnist Mike
Barnicle to resign after he used unattributed jokes from a book
by comedian George Carlin. When Mr. Barnicle refused to quit,
the paper instead suspended him for a month. Two weeks later he
was forced to resign when he couldn't substantiate a story from a
1995 column. (Mr. Barnicle denied fabricating the story and
said he had not read Mr. Carlin's books but was repeating jokes
he had heard from friends.)
Because Ms. Smith is black and Mr. Barnicle is white, the
Globe's hesitation to fire him prompted some readers and black
leaders to charge the paper with racial bias. Even the Globe's
ombudsman acknowledged a "double standard." It's hard to believe
that race was the deciding factor; more likely, the Globe was
comparatively lenient with Mr. Barnicle because he was more
senior and more popular than Ms. Smith.
Mr. Jacoby happens to be the Globe's only conservative
columnist, and some conservatives now accuse the paper of
singling him out on ideological grounds. Whether or not this
charge is true, the Globe's editors have failed to distinguish
between an error and a crime.
It's reminiscent of the 1996 case in which an Ohio junior high
school suspended a 13-year-old girl for possessing Midol, an
over-the-counter medicine for menstrual cramps, in violation of
the school's "zero tolerance" antidrug policy.
Kids who bring medicine to school don't deserve to be treated
like crack users, and Mr. Jacoby doesn't deserve to be treated
like a plagiarist or a fabricator.
=================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
*Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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