Permit a former journalist to tell a few war stories. Imagine me draped over a bar, if you like, at one of the journalist watering holes I’ve known over the years — Pat’s Idle Hour, Mel’s, the Brass Elephant, the CVP in Towson.
The first story harkens back to when I was an in-way-over-my-head political reporter for the San Antonio Light, sent to the border to write some sort of news feature on Lloyd Bentsen, the local “boy” who was Dukakis’s running mate. Being me (perverse), I ended up writing a piece about Republicans in South Texas, who were generally considered to have No Chance in the ’88 election, although George H.W. Bush carried the state easily. At the time, it was possible to vote a straight party tickety by pulling just one lever — aka una palanca. My lead centered on that, something about whether the Republicans would ever stand a chance in the land of una palanca. (I’m not going to swear by that spelling.) Later, my father reported back to me that a Big East Coast Newspaper had used a similar construction. I was flattered. It was the only evidence I had that I was doing anything right.
Skip ahead to October 1995. I was assigned to write a story about former pitcher Bobby Ojeda, who had agreed to speak at a local psychiatric hospital’s annual meeting, in part because he credited doctors there with saving his life after the infamous boating accident that killed two of his Cleveland Indian team mates. Because of a classic newsroom miscommunication, I was told I had to do the interview by phone; there were no funds for travel. (My editor thought Ojeda lived in California, but he was a three-hour drive away, in New Jersey.) I did all my reporting by phone — a lengthy interview with Ojeda, his agent, his doctor, his wife, and his best friend, Roger McDowell.
From the moment I got the assignment, my baseball savvy colleagues said: Have you read the Gary Smith profile of Ojeda from Sports Illustrated? It’s amazing, it’s incredible, no one could top that. Ultimately, I did read it, and my friends were right — no one was going to equal that story, prose-wise or reporting-wise. Still, I did my best. Ojeda was enormously generous, speaking at great length about very difficult things. He changed the way I thought about certain traumas, the capacity for recovery. He was, in short, one of the nicest people I ever interviewed.
The toughest interview was his friend, McDowell. He didn’t want to talk to me and once I got him on the phone, he plain didn’t want to talk. Didn’t want to tell his version of an anecdote Ojeda had already shared, about how McDowell had kept Ojeda from going AWOL from a Cleveland hospital where Ojeda was miserable. Didn’t want to take credit for anything. But at the end of the conversation, he suddenly said: You know, Bobby only survived because he’s so short. (For those who don’t know, Ojeda was one of three men in a boat that hit a pier. The other two were killed, one was virtually decapitated.)
It was a tantalizing detail, one I hadn’t read anywhere else, and I almost put it in the story. But then I decided that it went against what Ojeda had said he had learned at the hospital. No reasons, no answers, no explanations. He lived and his two teammates died. It was sheer luck, nothing more.
Shortly after the story was published, I went to hear Ojeda speak. When he walked in, I almost fainted. He’s incredibly tall, well over six feet. Later, I told him what McDowell had said. Ojeda’s wife rolled her eyes and said: “That sounds like Roger.”
But I’m not thinking about the Ojeda story today because of my near-miss. I’m looking at the old clip, one of the few I’ve saved, and wondering about my own research. How did I know that Ojeda wore a blue bandana to one of the funerals and “sobbed openly.” Was that based on something he told me, or cribbed from a Sports Illustrated photo, or the text itself? How did I know he was living on “margaritas, Doritos and salsa” when he first returned to Cleveland, or that his skin had a “greenish cast”? Where did I learn that there was a time that Ojeda couldn’t stomach the smell of coffee?
These are not idle questions for any Baltimore journalist, past and present, this week. Paste this link into your browser — http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlDC/newspapers/another_one_bites_the_dust_30428.asp — and tell me what you think. Is this plagiarism? Laziness? How far do journalists have to go to rewrite non-proprietary information?
Oh, and in a classic Smalltimore twist — one of Ojeda’s doctors would end up administering a personality test to me, in the twilight of my Sun career. This is the test that determined that my “sociopathy” score is off the charts, higher than the average sociopath’s. Thanks, Dr. McGee! It worked out really well for me.
What a slippery slope journalism is. It sounds like you did “all right,” Laura, as a journalist. (Wink… I think you did better than all right.) Having worked as a reporter covering weekly city council meetings and school board meetings and the occasional feature for the small town paper where I worked 20 years ago, I was constantly concerned about CYA issues (Covering My Attribution). It is pounded in in journalism classes, after all.
I think using background info from other sources is a fuzzy area. Why did the Sun let him get by with “four separate instances” if it was noticed? Why not reel him in after one instance?
And Laura, congrats on the sociopathic diagnosis!
From a reader’s perspective, it looks like laziness but not plagiarism but then I’ve been a reader and an on-again-off-again fan of Olesker’s for decades. There’s nothing there that he couldn’t have done as well on his own but he apparently didn’t bother, hence my verdict of laziness. But it doesn’t strike me that there was enough quantitatively (it seemed to just be a phrase or sentence or two here and there) or qualitatively (we aren’t talking hugely original ideas here either) to rise to the level of plagiarism. However, I’ve never taken an ethics in journalism course. And maybe I’m just bummed because I’ll miss his column.
We all should be so sociopathic!
I’ve pasted that link into Yahoo and Google. Both tell me it doesn’t exist. Has anyone else tried and gotten through?
Re the “resignation” of “you know who” I’m guessing that The Sun was not taking chances given all that has been happening media wise these past couple of years. Laura, your out-of-area readers must wonder what we are referring to.
Right, Peggy, why did the Sun delay after “four separate instances in a year and a half”* and why not mention it to Olesker the first time? Good HR practice requires review of each employee each year. Sounds more like a reaction to some of his reporting: “Michael Olesker, …. has been in a high-profile feud with Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich.”* But that’s the cynic in me!
*Sun Columnist Dismissed; Attribution Issues Cited
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 5, 2006; Page C04
June, make sure you’re pasting the whole link, ending with “asp” (sometimes a URL breaks over a line and you don’t get the whole thing when you copy it to paste it). See if that helps.
As for the bigger question, I wouldn’t want to judge without seeing the other two instances. The first they cited sounded very similar, the second a little less so. Also, keep in mind:
1. Both could be based on another quote by the primary source or other source, hence the similar language;
2. It’s difficult to stray too far from the wording in your sources without risking changing the meaning. (Mind you, I’m not saying you shouldn’t make every effort, just that it’s a fine line.)
Who knows what kind of deadline pressure Olesker was under the days he wrote the pieces in question? And who knows how much difficulty he might have had getting other sources for those particular pieces? I don’t condone intentional mimicry of wording in any writing, but I think it’s reasonable to cut journalists some slack. I think that most police themselves well anyway. In cases where it’s very clear there was intentional plagiarism, management can handle those individually. Thank goodness there aren’t more of them than there are.
Just my two-cents’ worth.
This link from the City Paper — http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=11319 — has all the examples known to date.
Another reader’s perspective…..
I agree with others’ comments: it looks more like laziness than plagiarism; there seems to be some less-than-perfect HR practice at the Sun; and, at the end of the day, I’d hate to judge without more context / background.
A couple of things did occur to me as I read the links: on the HR front, I wondered whether Olesker was perceived by the Sun’s management as some sort of ‘problem child’. If he was, this might have been the opportunity they were waiting for. And I’m not necessarily slamming the paper’s management…dealing with HR problems is really, really tough and most managers, even those with the best of intentions, aren’t very good at it. So issues have a way of being ignored until things have gone too far to be fixed.
It seems obvious to me that the Baltimore City Paper had some sort of agenda…or am I too cynical?
And, although Olesker seems only to have been coasting a bit rather than committing plagiarism, I think he picked the wrong time to do it. A couple of years ago, the Sun might have been able to slap his wrist and go on about their business. There’s been too much hullabaloo about journalistic integrity recently; journalists are living in a no-tolerance zone, and news organizations simply don’t have the ability to be as forgiving as they might like to be…
Just another two cents….
If anyone would like to contact the Sun:
Readers who have concerns or comments are encouraged to call Paul Moore, the newspaper’s public editor. He can be reached at 410-332-6364 or toll free at 1-800-829-8000, ext 6364, or by e-mail at publiceditor@baltsun.com
I’ve read all the instances in the City Paper article, and it’s murky. For one thing, I personally make a distinction between mimicing material from one’s own publication (in this case the Sun) and other publications. I think one’s own publication is more like fair game. At the reference publisher where I formerly worked, we had permission to repurpose material from any of our publications; in fact, in some circumstances it was considered a good thing because 1) it was economical, and 2) we knew the material was sound because it had already undergone rigorous fact-checking, and 3) we owned the copyright.
I might also add that at this company, we considered the Post one of only two U.S. newspapers that were acceptable sources for our writers to use (the Post was the other). So, using facts that appeared there isn’t as heinous (in my opinion) as, perhaps, repeating material heard secondhand elsewhere. (Obviously, going directly to the source is always best, but you have to balance that with deadlines, budgets, and the occasional unavailability of sources.)
I would be interested to know what the Sun (and any other publisher) tells employees about using material from other sources. (If the answer is “nothing,” then they’re negligent. They need a clearly communicated policy, at least these days.)
Whether it’s good or bad, the public seems to view the media the same way they view doctors–they’ve gotten so used to the near perfection of both that any error prompts cries of “malpractice!” And sometimes they’re right, but sometimes mistakes are just mistakes. Even someone who does amazing work 99.99 percent of the time can make a mistake. I’m not sure it should mean the end of a career. (If it does, we’d all better have a “Plan B” in our hip pockets for ourselves.)
The City Paper article is a bit more damning that I had anticipated. Hmmmm.
I’ve corrected the SI reporter’s name — it was Gary Smith.
Rae’s observation re: timing is a good one. You could probably spend an entire semester debating the ethics of attribution. Say, for example, you obtained the Bill O’Reilly lawsuit from The Smoking Gun website. Would you credit them in writing about it? Or would you think, “Hey, it’s a public document and I could have gone to the courthouse and gotten it.” If previously published articles note that “the Maryland General Assembly meets every year for 90 days,” do you have to tie yourself in knots to word this differently?
It’s been said that this particular instance has more shades of gray than some previous ones, and I tend to agree.