Journalism's chronic crisis
By Petya Stoeva and Stuart H. Loory Posted Jan 1 2005
The May 15 cover of the London Daily Mirror, in which the newspaper admitted to the fakery of the photos it ran earlier.
Intellectual corruption in the news business – particularly plagiarism and fakery – has long been a problem, but until recently, it had not received much attention.
The problem burst out of the closet in 2003 with the revelation that reporter Jayson Blair faked and stole large parts of 36 stories for The New York Times, a newspaper regarded by many as the world’s greatest.
Is such corruption a problem around the world? Is it taken seriously by news business professionals? IPI Global Journalist surveyed IPI board members and other leading journalists around the world to determine how widespread such corruption is.
The findings show that cheating occurs in daily newspapers, weeklies, books and magazines as well as in the broadcast media and on the Internet. It is done by award-winning veteran reporters and editors as well as beginners and even children. Not only news stories but also features, editorials and commentary are infected.
Photographs are not immune. A Los Angeles Times photographer, for example, edited two pictures together in March 2003 to create a more dramatic image of the war in Iraq. When his manipulation was discovered, the Times exposed the fakery to its readers and fired the photographer.
The London Daily Mirror, one of the largest circulation newspapers in the United Kingdom, ran pictures allegedly showing British soldiers abusing prisoners in Iraq. The pictures were taken seriously at first. Competing British papers picked up the story and ran versions of it. Military men and veterans charged the pictures were fakes. The Ministry of Defense investigated and confirmed the charge. The newspaper’s editor, Piers Morgan, resigned in disgrace.
Multiple cases of plagiarism have occurred in three other British Commonwealth countries. IPI Fellow Paddy Sherman, retired publisher of the Pacific Press in Canada, wrote of “three significant cases … since The New York Times perfected and exposed the art form.” In April, a prize-winning veteran reporter on the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest daily, lifted nearly a third of a story that appeared in The Village Voice about a U.S. Army deserter who had fled to Canada rather than go to Iraq. She had been given The Voice article by an editor. The reporter apologized. Managing Editor Mary Deanne Shears said the plagiarism was a “serious and unfortunate incident that arose out of equally unfortunate personal circumstances.”
In July, the editors of the National Post in Toronto fired medical reporter Brad Evenson after he faked quotes and identities in nine stories. In February, the Vancouver Sun used a piece by freelancer Angele Yanor about senior citizens learning to snowboard. The story bore a strong enough resemblance to a New York Times travel article for the Sun to dismiss Yanor.
Two plagiarism cases in Canada in the past year involved child writers. In one, a 13-year-old boy lifted a piece by a Star film critic and submitted it to the Star’s children’s magazine supplement. The boy’s parents said he thought copying was permissible. In the other, an 11-year-old boy copied an article from a children’s magazine and used it to win a Star contest for child writers. The incident prompted Camille Phillips, author of the plagiarized piece, to say, “It seems we have lost so much ground, ethically and morally, in the last generation or two.”
Indeed ground has been lost.
On the other side of the Pacific, Renee Kiriona, a reporter for The New Zealand Herald in July submitted a feature on a retired rugby captain. The resulting article was featured in The Herald’s magazine section and lauded by Carroll du Chateau, the assigning editor. The story was actually a combination of Kiriona’s original reporting and a story that had appeared earlier in the Waikato Times, a competing newspaper. Du Chateau had edited the two together. Neither the reporter nor editor was dismissed, although they did issue an apology and acknowledgement of the original piece.
In August, a student at South Africa’s Durban Institute of Technology, Reesha Chibba, accused Keeran Sewsunker, a reporter for the Durban Daily News, of serial plagiarism. Accuser and accused were friends, but she labeled him a plagiarist and wrote that he had copied text from other newspapers, Web sites and press releases.
In another case last year, a competitor accused Darrel Bristow-Bovey, a popular television critic, of plagiarizing book passages. Bristow-Bovey first denied the charges but then resigned from the three papers for which he wrote: The Cape Times, Business Day and The Sunday Independent.
Although seemingly more prevalent in English-language organizations, plagiarism and fakery is a problem elsewhere. In Denmark in 2001, an editorial writer for Berlingske Tidende copied an editorial article from Politiken, the paper’s main competitor.
In 2004, charges against two Danish authors surfaced for plagiarizing American books. In one, a Danish writer stole from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Managing Stress. The Danish publisher withdrew the book. In the other, an author was charged with stealing from American writer Walter Isaacson’s biography of Henry Kissinger. That matter is still under investigation. Isaacson took it with humor, telling the New York Post “it probably reads better in Danish.”
In Switzerland in 2002, a freelance writer sold a piece to the newspaper Blick saying that Ambassador Thomas Borer, while representing his country in Germany, was cavorting with a shady lady and might have been paying her blackmail. Borer, who is married to an American beauty queen, denied the charge, and an investigation showed the paper to be wrong. It fired the freelancer, apologized to the diplomat and made a cash settlement. Borer left the Foreign Service.
In Israel, a reporter for Ha’aretz took a leave in the early 1990s to accompany his wife to the United States. From there, he filed features, including one about a rabbi who had converted a tribe of American Indians to Judaism. A reader in the United States recalled seeing the same story in an American newspaper and sent a copy to Ha’aretz. The two pieces were identical. The reporter was suspended for six months but rehired when he returned to Israel.
Yoshio Murakami, advisor for international affairs of the International Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun, speaking at the IPI annual meeting in Warsaw in May, said the worst single problem of Japanese newspapers is plagiarism. He told of a reporter filing a story from Hiroshima on nuclear non-proliferation in 2000 that contained material from a competing paper’s earlier story. The reporter was fired and three editors suffered salary cuts. Asahi Shimbun apologized to its readers and the paper from which its reporter stole.
In Azerbaijan, two reporters were fired this year – one for plagiarism and one for falsification, said Azer Hasret, chairman of the Press Council. In the plagiarism case, a reporter from the newspaper Yezhednevnie Novosti published a piece in June that was a copy of one that ran in Nash Vek in September 2003. In the falsification case, the Baku Press, a monthly, wrote lies about a district government leader. He complained to the country’s Press Council that the paper demanded a bribe and printed lies. After Council deliberations, the Baku Press writer was fired.
Respondents from six countries said there were no reportable instances of intellectual corruption.
Dan Krishock, managing editor of Buenos Aires Herald in Argentina, said plagiarism is not a significant problem, partly because of the market’s size. “It’s a small media market. Plagiarism would be spotted pretty quickly,” he said. “I think that limits the extent to which people feel they can plagiarize and get away with it.”
Hanoch Marmari, former editor of Israel’s Ha’aretz and an IPI member, agreed. “Since we’re a small country and everybody knows everybody, it’s very clear that you can’t fake things because in 24 hours, someone will come out and say that it was fake … It’s almost impossible … I think it’s a problem of a huge society like the American one.”
In some cases, however, a small market may have the exact opposite effect. Nermin Durmo, director of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Press Council said, “It [plagiarism] happens. ... There’s not such a strong public opinion on plagiarism or anything else as you have in the United States. Democracy must be learnt.”
In Nigeria, the local public plays the exact opposite role by creating a system of checks and balances with the media, Emeka Izeze, managing director of The Guardian, said. “Whenever it [plagiarism] happens, it becomes an issue … You have to keep explaining why this happened. “If at any time I discover a serial plagiarist, then we simply dismiss him. Every time we publish the accurate correction.”
Marcelo Rech, editor of Zero Hora in Brazil, said there were no plagiarism scandals in the last 10 years. He attributed the absence to strict control in the newsroom, training and ethical discussions.
Uganda, on the other hand, struggles with daily cases of plagiarism that often go undetected, according to Samuel Gummah, lecturer in broadcasting at Makerere University in Kampala. “Some people have stopped talking about it [plagiarism] because everyone is doing it,” he says. Plagiarism is worse among broadcast journalists, Gummah said, because of the number of radio stations, which often employ unqualified and poorly trained reporters. Before 2002, plagiarism cases were on the rise, but are now steady, a pattern that correlates to the growth of radio stations. “Maybe because we are more aware of it, we’re seeing more cases,” he says.
Poor training, lack of finances and poor quality control have all been blamed for the prevalence, or at least occurrence, of plagiarism.
Above all, however, the Internet made plagiarism much easier than it had been. While the Internet presents great opportunities for journalists, it also poses serious challenges. Kirk LaPointe, managing editor of the Vancouver Sun of the Internet: “There is this great gateway to this exciting information that a reporter can steal, but on the other hand, there’s a record of it and anybody who steals can be caught.”
While the Internet has been blamed for the problem, none of the respondents saw it as a possible solution. Anti-plagiarism software is not yet generally used in the newsroom.
“I think that newsrooms have to operate on trust. Reporters and editors have to know each other and have to trust each other,” the Toronto Star ombudsman, Don Sellar said. “I question whether technology is the answer.”
LaPointe said his newspaper is proceeding with caution on the use of such software. “I don’t think we want to send the signal to our reporters that they are not trusted. Our business is built on trust. We believe that we hire people of high quality, people of high standards and original thinkers.”
One sobering comment came from Santiago Ybarra, Chairman of VOCENTO/Spain:
“Nowadays, intellectual corruption, to use that strong term, comes mainly from inaccuracy more than from the making up of stories.”
His point is that intellectual corruption involves a multitude of sins, including poor sourcing and manipulation of news for economic gain and suggests that honesty problems go far beyond the worldwide plagiarism documented here.