On plagiarism

I love two lines that real journalists use. One is a parody of the New York Times masthead motto, "All the news that's fit to print." The parody: "All the news that fits we print." The other one came from my friend Dean Miller, now Director of Media Literacy at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and a former news person here in Idaho: "Imitation is the sincerest form of plagiarism." I think the phrase was coined by Oscar Levant but in a column on plagiarism I am walking on egg shells. Here is a statement about the statement:

"At Ad Contrarian global headquarters, our editorial board is delighted when other bloggers quote us, link to us, or reference us. However, believe it or not, we work hard on this blog and don't take kindly to it when people steal our stuff."

But people do steal, and more than the raisins out of your cake, the cashews from your mixed nuts and all the black jellybeans from the bowl on your desk. Lifting words from writers is the same as stealing Christmas displays from lawns, money from bank accounts or bicycles from the rack at Woodland Middle School.

When I was teaching freshman English at Northern Illinois University, long before the age of computers and the Internet, instructors would post suspect essays on the bulletin board of our coffee room. We had a staff of about 120 graduate students, instructors and professors and we would all take a gander. Most of the time someone was familiar with the source and the offender would be caught. Some students probably escaped detection but the harsh penalties we meted out deterred some timid souls from trying to fool their instructors.

One essay about Chaucer posted quite a while was finally identified by a lowly instructor. The essay, copied virtually word for word, came from a publication written 25 years before by the very professor who posted it. The red faced professor got plenty of teasing for not being able to identify his own scholarly work but the student got more than teasing, an F in the course.

A student turned in an essay to me that reported 19th Century English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) came to the United States just before World War I to give lectures on music; the student, cribbing an encyclopedia article, had skipped over the end of the article on the poet and copied part of another article about a black composer named Samuel Coleridge-Taylor who lived many years later. A colleague pointed me to the encyclopedia in which both articles appeared.

Another friend and colleague took his doctorate in English at the University of Chicago, a really good place; one professor told his students they did not need to footnote sources because he had read and remembered them all, anyway. I guess plagiarism was not an issue in those classes but such things are very rare.

There have been some pretty high profile stories about plagiarism in journalism over the past 20 years or so; formerly such things were hushed up and employees quietly cleaned out desks and departed. In these days of instant communication, the stealing or invention of sources is discovered most often by someone outside the immediate circle, perhaps doing a Google search for a key phrase.

Even within the narrow confines of reading the Coeur d'Alene Press and The Spokesman-Review I see examples of plagiarism, not by staff writers, who generally know the risks of stealing other people's stuff, but in letters to the editor and My Turn columns. From time to time I contact those individuals privately and let them know someone is watching. I doubt plagiarists much care.

Tim Hunt, the son of a linotype operator, is a retired college professor and nonprofit administrator who lives in Hayden with his wife and three cats. He can be reached at linotype.hunt785@gmail.com.