Toby Young, the British former assistant to the Vanity Fair editor who turned his six month gopher gig into a book and movie deal, stole passages for How to Lose Friends and Alienate People from a NYT story by John Tierney about the bitchy guys and gals at Conde Nast. Confronted with the accusation, Young is all: Yeah, so? [Intel]
'Roy Greenslade has been running a series of articles in The Guardian based on email exchanges with unnamed sources within the Daily Telegraph. A recent email that he received and writes about in his column today alleges that plagiarism is rife at the respected British newspaper.
'Greenslade quotes directly from the email, which states: "You do realise, don't you, that stuff is being lifted with hardly a word changed from the Mail website and the Metro?"' [Editors Weblog]
It looks like radio host and veteran plagiarist Monica Crowley might've once against taken credit for something that wasn't hers. This time it's a John McCain ad spoof that wasn't terribly funny in the first place. [HuffPo]
Recall Madonna Constantine, the Columbia University professor who made headlines last October after claiming to be a victim of a hate crime when she found a noose hanging from her door. At the time, it wasn't public that Constantine was also under investigation for widespread plagiarism, charged with lifting others' work without credit in numerous academic journal articles she bylined. So then it was thought that perhaps somebody sympathetic to Constantine, or Constantine herself, had placed the noose on her door to drum up sympathy for her, boning up her defense that she was the victim — of "structural racism that pervades this institution," according to her own words.
An investigation was launched to encompass both matters and now, it seems, a conclusion: CONTINUED »
Even your borderline autistic stepson could recognize the obvious similarities between the image at left, from a 1962 Tales to Astonish Marvel comic book from Fantastic Four creator Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers, and the image at right, a Cartoon Contest item from The New Yorker drawn by Harry Bliss. The New Yorker cartoon makes no mention of its origins, but after a mini scandal began brewing over plagiarism when a University of Wisconsin recognized the similarities, the magazine responded that Bliss intended the drawing to be an overt Kirby reference; that those in the know would just get it. [NYP] Nevermind, though: On the website, the cartoon will be re-identified as "Drawing by Harry Bliss, after Jack Kirby." Or maybe it should be "Drawing by Harry Bliss, after Jack Kirby, after stealing the idea of ripping off a New Yorker cartoon from Elaine Benes."
BYLINE: PLAGIARIST New York Times plagiarizer Alexei Barrionuevo gets a third chance from the paper to muck things up with an article on Chile's salmon industry. It goes without saying: The salmon industry has already refuted parts of the story. But at least she didn't rip off somebody else's work this time! [Newsbusters]
You sort of expect to read plagiarized articles, columns, and books in newspapers, magazines, and websites around the world. But do you expect to read copied work submitted by … children? In the Washinton Post? "One of the poems that KidsPost published April 29 as part of its poetry contest was not written by the child who submitted it. The poem that appeared as “Horrible, Just Horrible” was actually written by Shel Silverstein and is titled “One Out of Sixteen.” The child who sent in the poem originally told KidsPost that it was her work. Another poem on the page, titled “Eraser,” was inspired by, but not credited to, Louis Phillips, who wrote “The Eraser Poem.”" [WaPo via RTE]
The Harry Potter lawsuit currently making its way through New York courtroom testimony is nothing if not a tearfest. Author J.K. Rowling and film distributor Warner Bros. are suing publisher RDR, which wants to print Steven Jan Vander Ark's encyclopedic Harry Potter Lexicon, a print companion to Ark's website of the same name, which explains all those made up words from the bestseller. But the real story here is all the breaking down on the witness stand.
On Monday, it was Rowling's turn … or almost: She "came to the edge of tears" and had to "regain her composure" during testimony. "It’s very difficult for someone who is not a writer to understand," she told the court. "The closest I can come is to say to someone, ‘How do you feel about your child?'"
And yesterday? CONTINUED »
Admitting to fabrications is probably something Katie Couric should take off her To-Do list.
Last spring's Katie Couric Notebook scandal – where a producer was fired for lifting a Wall Street Journal column – revealed the CBS News anchor isn't responsible for her own words.
Now, she's admitting more of the same is true: At a poetry event last night, she revealed a poem she wrote 45 years ago as a kid, published in The St. James Grammar School Gazette, was actually the work of Penny Eastman.
If imitation is the highest form of flattery, what does that make plagiarism? We don’t know, but Michael Lucas probably does, because his Barack Obama bashing column has more than a few similarities with Ann Coulter’s “Throw Grandma Under A Bus,” which she published on March 19, two days before Lucas’ piece.
How does the Wall Street Journal get away with lifting stories from the New York Times? Not by outright copy/pasting them — that's totally the Times' M.O. Rather, they've got a website called LiveMint.com that, notes Sunday deputy business editor Patricia Kranz they're "partnered" with that does the grabbing from the NYT and International Herald Tribune for them. Snea-kay.
Last month, Jack Shafer exposed New York Times scribe Alexei Barrionuevo's lifting of two sentences from a Miami Herald story. Since then, somebody's been making use of his Lexis account: Shafer now finds Barrionuevo isn't guilty of just the one infraction. Turns out, he's a borderline serial plagiarizer, lifting others' material since at least 2005. Times managing editor Jill Abramson looked into the "transgression" and responds that "Alexei did not fully understand Times policy." So, just as a PSA: Generally, newspapers do not lift the words of others without credit. All good now?
Jack Shafer, who loves giving the Times crap for its inane drug stories, finds an article that is not only stupid, but rife with plagiarism. [Slate]
Okay, so supposedly this article is about how wunderkind elitist mag 02138, and how they unearthed this giant university-wide plagiarism scandal and revealed that Harvard's most prominent professors are "secretly" outsourcing menial research tasks to annoying student overachievers.
But since that's not particularly interesting or surprising, we've decided to switch to a new topic: 02138. Does anyone else find it sort-of annoying that this magazine (featuring articles like "How Not To Be Poor") is succeeding? [Note: Saying "Yes" might preclude you entry to various secret societies, highbrow social institutions and eclusive millionaire's clubs that you couldn't possibly afford, anyway, because let's face it, you went to Columbia.]
Nevertheless, we've decided to risk social pariahdom by voicing our dissatisfaction the only way we know how: through inarticulate instant messages. After the jump, a revealing IM debate between dueling Jossip editors Debbie Newman and Rebecca Aronauer. (Both Columbia grads).
Even though we know that special issues of the New Yorker are just an excuse for more ad pages, we still fall for the Cartoon Issue, which came out last week. After all, cartoons are the reason we still read started reading the New Yorker.
But this year’s edition featured a cartoon by Lee Lorenz (left) that seemed eerily similar to a drawing by Gary Larson (right) from 1984. CONTINUED »
Just when you thought stealing from young adult chick lit was as low as it gets, a writer was caught lifting passages from Wikipedia. George Orwel, author of Black Gold: The New Frontier in Oil for Investors, admitted that he had taken five paragraphs from a Wikipedia entry on the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia.
It’s tough to tell what’s more distributing about this revelation: Orwel stealing from an encyclopedia or using a source in a scholarly book that is known for its inaccuracies. Either way, the George Orwell with two Ls in his name would not approve.
In today's Marketwatch, our favorite slow-to-catch-on media columnist Jon Friedman puts his (cough) credibility on the line to vouch for Howard Kurtz, who's taken a beating in the press (and on unimportant media blogs) over that plagiarism kerfuffle and subsequent cover-up attempt. To prove his point—by making a flimsy unrelated one—Friedman commends Gawker's recent addition Maggie Shnayerson on her top notch, behind-the-scenes reporting.
Writes Friedman:
The biggest flap occurred when Gawker's Maggie Shnayerson did some terrific fact-checking and revealed that Kurtz's work contained a passage that had originally appeared in David Blum's 2004 book on "60 Minutes."
We're sure the fact that the enterprising Maggie used to WORK FOR BLUM at The Village Voice (a possibly-related factoid she readily discloses in her coup!) had absolutely nothing to do w/ that "terrific fact-checking."*
ABC News has completed its investigation of Alexis Debat (a.k.a. the French Jayson Blair) the "journo" was recently fired by the work for "falsifying his resumé" and "generally making shit up."
Ultimately, ABC has concluded that "the reporting he had contributed to the network was sound." Somewhat less sound, however, are ABC's lax non-discriminatory hiring guidelines and noticeable absence of background checks.
Fortunately, reports the Times, "ABC says it will make changes to its hiring practices." To that end, the proposed change already being taken under advisement: Stop hiring any/all known plagiarists.
Although we can’t always shake the nasty habit of writing in the royal we, occasionally one of our editors decides to shake off the cloak of anonymity to write a short, pithy statement long, rambling diatribe about a topic of their choice. Today, Debbie Newman is that editor.
A few days ago, passages from Howard Kurtz's new book surfaced on the web, purporting to shed new light on what transpired behind the scenes at CBS headquarters less than twenty-four hours before the network ran its now-infamous National Guard story.
At 35, Alexis Debat was pretty successful. He had a respectable position in a well-regarded think tank, he was a regular face on television, he was quoted in newspapers… why did he need to keep fabricating interviews in a French journal with a limited circulation?
Interesting query, Rue89! But we think we've got it all figured out.
Presumably, Debat did it for the same reason that always drives people to routinely make up semi-believable interviews for modestly read French publications, namely they're insecure, overcompensating for a lifetime of inadequacy and slightly fucked in the head.
You're welcome.
Editorial Director
