Can I sug­gest it is time to call off the pla­gi­ar­ism police? Case in point. Journ­al­ism pro­fessor admits pla­gi­ar­ism. Yup, it is a neat head­line. So was this a Jayson Blair–style rip-off? Hardly. In fact it wasn’t pla­gi­ar­ism at all.

The pla­gi­ar­ism in ques­tion was three quotes (lif­ted from this piece) included in a cur­mudgeonly op-ed in a col­lege pub­lic­a­tion called the Mis­sourian by an eld­erly journ­al­ism pro­fessor called John Mer­rill.

The ori­ginal piece (and yes, you do kind of have to care to bother read­ing…):

The Women’s and Gender Stud­ies Pro­gram is becom­ing a full-fledged depart­ment in the Col­lege of Arts and Sci­ence, effect­ive this semester.

“For us, it means new oppor­tun­it­ies,” said Jes­sica Jen­nrich, dir­ector of Under­gradu­ate Advising, Cur­riculum and Pro­gram­ming for the depart­ment. “We can offer new classes and more classes, and it gives us more visibility.”

Mer­rill uses the quote in the fol­low­ing “grumpy old man” fash­ion:

It doesn’t really sur­prise me, but I now learn that MU is get­ting a new, full-fledged depart­ment … It is called the women’s and gender stud­ies depart­ment. The dir­ector of under­gradu­ate advising for the new depart­ment, Jes­sica Jen­nrich, said that they can “now offer new classes and more classes, and it gives us more visibility.”

A whole depart­ment, mind you, just like philo­sophy and Eng­lish … What about a depart­ment of male stud­ies or homo­sexual studies?

You can see where Mer­rill is headed. It’s polit­ical cor­rect­ness gone mad! Still, he wasn’t hauled up for lack of originality.

His crime? Accord­ing to the Mis­sourian editor:

By dir­ectly quot­ing sources, Pro­fessor Mer­rill implies to the reader that he spoke with those people. There was no inde­pend­ent veri­fic­a­tion of facts through ori­ginal report­ing. A reader should be able to judge the source of inform­a­tion, includ­ing whether inform­a­tion was taken from other publications.

So, if he was blog­ging Mer­rill would prob­ably have linked to them. But I cer­tainly didn’t think he’d spoken to them, did you? It read to me like he was quot­ing them (the “quo­ta­tion marks” are an indic­ator). And actu­ally attrib­ut­ing them makes not the slight­est dif­fer­ence to the piece (apart from adding in a layer of ugli­ness and pro­lix­ity). As for veri­fy­ing the facts? Please.

For the record, here are the Mis­sourian’s stand­ards:

The fol­low­ing is a list­ing of what con­sti­tutes pla­gi­ar­ism in the newsroom:

• Tak­ing mater­ial ver­batim from the archive. Even if the art­icle was prin­ted in the Mis­sourian, it is still someone else’s work. Put it in your own words or attrib­ute it to the Mis­sourian “as pre­vi­ously repor­ted in the Mis­sourian.”
• Using mater­ial ver­batim from the wire. Loc­al­iz­ing wire stor­ies is encour­aged, but the wire ser­vice should be given a credit line.
• Using mater­ial from other pub­lic­a­tions without attribution.
• Using news releases verbatim.
• Using mater­ial off a Web site verbatim.

Are these rules inten­ded to dis­cip­line young journ­al­ists or beat up old professors?

They cer­tainly don’t pro­duce good journ­al­ism. They instil a dead respect for things that carry their own weight. Writ­ing down someone else’s words is not work and doesn’t cre­ate a new form of prop­erty right. And guess what — no facts were veri­fied in this post. Maybe there is no place called Missouri.

Sourcing quotes is import­ant for CONTEXT — to help people UNDERSTAND something.

No one read­ing Merrill’s piece could pos­sibly have gained any­thing from learn­ing where his quotes had ori­gin­ally appeared, any more than they would have been helped by know­ing what the people quoted liked for breakfast.

So an old man is humi­li­ated, but the Mis­sourian’s rules retain their vir­tue. God bless the rules.

Read­ing Pro­pa­ganda by Edward Bernays. Although Bernays is pop­ularly por­trayed as an anti-democratic elit­ist, he was — by the stand­ards of his time — lib­eral and progressive.

He ends the book with a typ­ical pro­gress­ive sen­ti­ment — that more edu­ca­tion, and bet­ter inform­a­tion will make pub­lic debate more reasoned and more enlightened:

If the pub­lic is bet­ter informed about the pro­cesses of its life, it will be so much the more recept­ive to reas­on­able appeals to its own interests.

That’s why he’s a pro­gress­ive. But then there’s the kicker:

No mat­ter how soph­ist­ic­ated, how cyn­ical the pub­lic may become about pub­li­city meth­ods, it must respond to the basic appeals, because it will always need food, crave amuse­ment, long for beauty, respond to leadership.

In other words, our anim­al­istic instincts will never cease being an express elev­ator to the psy­cho­lo­gical base­ment. That’s why he’s an elitist.

This ten­sion under­lies the pub­lic ser­vice notion of mod­ern journ­al­ism. It’s the “schizo­phrenia” that Michael Schud­son talks about when he writes:

I pro­pose that the news media should be self-consciously schizo­phrenic in their efforts to per­form a demo­cratic polit­ical func­tion. They should both cham­pion the kind of demo­cracy that the polit­ical sci­ent­ists say we have little chance of achiev­ing and, at the same time, they should ima­gin­at­ively respond to the real­it­ies of con­tem­por­ary polit­ics that the schol­ars have observed.

And Schud­son is really just refin­ing for the media what F.Scott Fitzger­ald wrote in a self-lacerating piece for Esquire, back in 1936:

The test of a first-rate intel­li­gence is the abil­ity to hold two oppos­ing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the abil­ity to func­tion. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hope­less yet be determ­ined to make them otherwise.

I first became aware of Danie Kru­gel through a review by Anton Har­ber of an edi­tion of South African cur­rent affairs show Carte Blanche. It was an invest­ig­a­tion into the where­abouts of miss­ing vic­tims of a pae­do­phile mur­derer. Har­ber said:

“I am not sure what Carte Blanche was doing in this story, but it is not journ­al­ism. They base their report on two dubi­ous char­ac­ters — a clair­voy­ant and an ex-policeman [Kru­gel] with a mys­ter­i­ous super-machine — who led them to a patch of ground where they found a few uniden­ti­fied bone frag­ments. This stuff belongs in a super­hero comic, not in journalism.“

George Claassen nailed it even more firmly.

I nearly blogged it, but I didn’t — surely Brit­ish journ­al­ism, how­ever low, could never sink that far into the prim­or­dial swamp of super­sti­tion. But the great thing about journ­al­ism is, it can always sur­prise you.

It wasn’t just them, but here is the Observer:

Traces of Madeleine McCann’s body were found on a Por­tuguese beach weeks after she was repor­ted miss­ing, dur­ing tests by a former detect­ive [Danie Kru­gel] renowned for loc­at­ing abduc­ted children.

Ben Gol­dacre pitches in man­fully. Remem­ber, for all the things sci­ence can’t explain, there’s a per­fectly simple super­nat­ural explanation.