How to Avoid a Blogosphere Scandal: Don’t Plagiarize!

Wednesday, August 9: Big faker.
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This is the second part of a series of posts called “How to Avoid a Blogosphere Scandal.” See the first post, Disclose!

Plagiarism is stealing someone else’s work and passing it off as your own. Plagiarism is probably the most frustrating thing writers have to deal with, aside from having an editor reject an article idea. Writing is not as easy as it looks. All writers love to “have written,” but doing the actual writing is work. It requires a lot of butt-in-chair time. It requires focus and concentration. At least that’s how it is for me.

Most educated folks can string words together to form a coherent sentence, but good writers know now to string those words together artfully to make the prose sing. Diction (word choice) and how and when one uses literary devices like alliteration, irony, onomatopoeia, and tone are part of a writer’s unique style. The more unique that style, the easier it is to discover whether someone has plagiarized the work.

Writers who take the time to research and craft a well-written, informative, and entertaining story shouldn’t have to worry about others stealing and getting credit for their hard work.

Examples of Plagiarism

Copying another writer’s work word for word and putting your name on it is the most obvious example of plagiarism. The knuckhead who wrote this op-ed copied it almost word for word from this writer. Three words: dumb, dumb, and dumb. (Source)

Failing to cite sources is a less obvious example. For instance, some writers and bloggers may read an article and write about the information contained in the article without referencing or citing the article. That may not be so bad if the information in the story is widely known and/or reported. But if the reporter obtained an exclusive interview for the story, and subsequent stories and posts that contain information from the exclusive interview fail to cite the original story, it’s plagiarism.

There’s a fine line between paraphrasing and plagiarizing, in my opinion. Bloggers paraphrase news stories quite often, but as long as you cite and link to the story, it’s usually good enough. If you use the same expressions and phrases as the source, that could be considered plagiarism, even if you cite the source. While ideas are not protected, a writer’s unique style can be.

For more information on plagiarism, see the following:

• Princeton University - Examples of Plagiarism
• How to Recognize Plagiarism
• Plagiarism: Definitions, Examples and Penalties
• Plagiarism: What It is and How to Recognize and Avoid It
• Plagiarism–and how to avoid it!
• Plagiarism.org
• Plagiarism Today - A blog run by a writer whose work was plagiarized, and now he dedicates his time to weeding out plagiarism on the web.

Who’s the most well-known plagiarist in the blogosphere? Click the link below to read more.

Ben Domenech, Blogger

Many of you may recall the blog swarm that swirled around blogger Ben Domenech, co-founder of the group blog RedState. Before he started blogging, Ben contributed to National Review Online (scroll down for the archives) and other publications. I remember the green-eyed monster in my brain struggling against its binding when I realized Ben wasn’t even 25 at the time. It took me forever to get an NRO clip. (Here’s a recent clip.)

When the Washington Post hired Ben to author its “conservative” blog Red America, liberal bloggers were incensed. They went to work to dig up whatever dirt they could find on him, and indeed, there was dirt to be dug. Some called him a racist and admonished the Post for hiring him, and others found many instances of plagiarism in his writing, including in some NRO and Washington Post articles.

While conservative bloggers rallied around him, it became obvious that he was guilty of what he was accused of. It was discovered that Ben had passed off the work of others as his own as far back as 1999.

Daily Kos and others documented several instances of Ben’s plagiarism. This post includes a word-for-word comparison between one of Ben’s articles and one he “borrowed” from. So does this one.

I don’t usually link to Wikipedia, but I’ll make a exception today because the entry on Ben is thorough and accurate. The Plagiarism section of his entry contains a chronological and well-linked synopsis of the scandal with links to articles in the mainstream media. You know a blog scandal is big when MSM covers it. See Blogger Quits Amid Furor and A portrait of the blogger as a young plagiarist.

Some conservative bloggers defended him; others asked him to confess and apologize. Ben’s fate was officially sealed, in my assessment, when Michelle Malkin withdrew her support. Ben apologized and resigned from the Post.

No doubt the blog swarm surrounding Ben Domenech was politically motivated, but the blogosphere is a highly politicized place. Bloggers should know that going in.

Ann Coulter

People on the Left and many on the Right hate Ann Coulter. They hate her books, her looks, her columns, her attitude — everything about her. I happen to like her and her work, but that’s irrelevant.

Her recent book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, raised the blood pressure of many, including some conservatives. The biggest brouhaha stemmed around her criticism of the “Jersey Girls,” a group of 9/11 widows who campaigned for John Kerry and against George Bush. Ann was getting a lot of press, and I’m sure she’s sold a lot of books. Liberals couldn’t stand it. They went to work to discredit her any way they could. A writer for a leftist web site called TPMmuckraker listed what he considered instances of plagiarism in some of Ann’s columns and books.

After an investigation into the allegations, Ann’s column syndicate, Universal Press Syndicate, determined that she did not plagiarize. Read more about the big stink at Google News.

John Hawkins and others came to Ann’s defense.

Sometimes determining whether someone has plagiarized is tricky, as was the case with Ann Coulter. There are only so many ways to express ideas, and a recitation of facts that appear similar to someone else’s recitation isn’t necessarily plagiarism.

Others accused of plagiarism: Historian and writer Doris Kearns Goodwin’s reputation was ruined when others found instances of plagiarism in her books. She admitted to it and said that in the confusion of gathering so much source material, she failed to include quotation marks around certain passages, etc. See “How the Goodwin Story Developed”; Alex Haley, author of Roots (also see Thomas Sowell’s column and this article); Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code; Kaavya Viswanathan, a Harvard student who landed and lost a fat book contract after it was discovered she copied passages from another author; and Martin Luther King, Jr. (see “Authorship Issues”)

When In Doubt, Cite, Rephrase

There is lots of information out there, and what I’ve blogged about will give you a good place to start. As I said, there are only so many ways to state facts, but if you copy someone’s unique way of expressing those facts, it’s probably plagiarism. Some facts are considered “common knowledge,” like references to historical events, so those are fair game.

The simplest ways to avoid accusations of plagiarism are to cite sources and to express the same/similar set of facts and ideas as your source in different ways using different words and sentence structure whenever possible. Be careful about paraphrasing, though; it’s sometimes considered plagiarism.

Plagiarism is a separate but closely related part of copyright infringement. Bloggers should know that it is a copyright violation to copy and paste entire news articles and posts on your blog, even if you cite the source. I’ve seen bloggers do this with my work and the work of others. In one case, I discovered that a blogger posted one of my posts on his blog and “forgot” to source me. I e-mailed him, and the matter was resolved.

Some automated blog programs (used primarily by unscrupulous spammers trying to make money from Google Adsense) republish articles and posts without listing the authors’ names. (See Spammers Want Your Content)

Personal Note

I’ve plagiarized before, I suppose. When I started writing my first biweekly column in 2002, in some cases I failed to cite sources (news stories), giving the impression that it was my research. (Many writers and bloggers are likely guilty of doing that occasionally, but I’m responsible for my own actions.) Though it wasn’t an intent to deceive, it was wrong nonetheless. For that, I’m sorry and will make amends. Whether it was an unclear understanding of exactly what plagiarism was or lazy writing and thinking, I don’t recall. As an English major in college, however, I should have known better.

[Note: I'm biased. I'd like to think the instances were too trivial to qualify as "plagiarism," but since credibility is important to me, it helps to put it out there for others to judge.]

Looking back at those columns, I see that I did cite sources most of the time, and I strive to be diligent about citing sources now. I’m not important and/or threatening enough (yet?) to generate a massive blog swarm, but if I were to become a Washington Post blogger or a syndicated columnist or land a six-figure book deal, I’m sure the wolves would be pacing outside my front door, ready to pounce. I can say this with some relief: the small amount of blood they’d draw certainly won’t be filling.

As I wrote in Disclose!, the first post in this series, people who don’t like you or what you stand for will look for ways to bring you down. Don’t give them the ammunition or the satisfaction. Stay clean and play by the rules.

Other sources:

• Regret the Error’s 2005 plagiarism round-up
• Plagiarism in the blogosphere
• Blogosphere Shows Little Mercy for Plagiarism
• Authorship gets lost on Web

(Photo credits: Kaavya Viswanathan - Globe Staff Photo / David L. Ryan, Alex Haley - ABC )