No Guardians at the Gate - a Look at Plagiarism Within the New York Times

No Guardians at the Gate:

A Look at Plagiarism within The New York Times

Team Universal

Gen 300

Ms. Sheila Cox

April 16, 2004

No Guardians at the Gate:

A Look at Plagiarism within The New York Times

The highly competitive nature of news reporting is challenging the media to better scrutinize their procedures for upholding their ethical imperatives and objectivity. Today's instant information society continues to apply great pressure on news outlets the world over. Demands for "live feed", imbedded reporting, and minute-by-minute updates, are now the threads by which media empires will rise and fall. The pressures and demands are such that an increasing number of correspondents have given way to plagiarism, in order to meet expectations. Kelly R. Taylor (2003, November) says, "Plagiarism is the unauthorized use of the language and thoughts of another author, and the representation of them as one's own. To plagiarize is to take and use ideas or words from another's work by plagiarism"(p.54). Plagiarism is the bane of writers, as much as it is to the institutions and the public for which they write. It is the tiny germ that infects everything it touches; wrecking careers, destroying public confidence, and damaging the reputations of respected institutions. A serious outbreak of this virulent plague occurred at the mighty New York Times; impaling its vaunted credibility and destroying the career of one of its most promising young reporters.

Jayson Blair's failure as a reporter for The New York Times is one that also exposes this giant of journalism; readily sacrificing its ethical standards for purposes of maintaining its competitive edge. In light of its brilliant history and billions of dollars in brand equity, one would think that the Times should be able to resist such dangerous and unworthy shortcuts. In the aftermath of the scandal that followed, The New York Times must surely have asked, "Was it worth it?"

Jayson Blair submitted some 600 articles during his four-year tenure with The New York Times. Contained within them are so many incidents of fabricated facts, questionable datelines, and plagiarism that one can hardly believe they went undetected for so long. A review of the 73 articles written in the eight months prior to his resignation on May 1, 2003, reveals serious discrepancies in most of them (Goldman &Getlin; 2003). Among the most infamous examples is his coverage of the rescued soldier, Pvt. Jessica Lynch. The compelling story of Private Lynch had huge national and world-wide impact; both for the early attempts at propagandizing the story, and the actual facts that eventually came to light.

According to the detailed record published by the Times, Blair submitted twelve stories between March 27 and April 13, 2003. Four of these contained gross examples of plagiarism (Witnesses and documents, 2003, May 11). The detailed document relates, "Blair quoted Jessica's father as saying that he was 'truly grateful' to the Iraqi lawyer who led U.S. forces to his daughter and that the lawyer 'would get a world of hugs out of that heroic deal'". Questions arise with the Times' revelation that while Mr. Lynch made these statements to several news reporters; Jayson Blair was not among them. In fact, several Lynch family members deny that any of them ever had conversations with Blair at all. Blair plagiarized the work of Associated Press correspondent, Allison Barker, as she reported on the sequence of surgeries performed on Private Lynch. It would be the first of three other stories Barker submitted, where direct quotations were subsequently hijacked by Blair. The instances are made more glaring by the fact that Blair was rarely, if ever, in the locations of his datelines (Adler, R.; 2003). His case is so blatant that it begs the question, how did The New York Times, "Gray Lady of Journalism"; manage to overlook such flagrant disregard for its professional ethics?

Questions of policy, procedure, and wider culpability need to be further examined. An internal Times audit disclosed that Blair had never secured nor even reserved accommodations in the region surrounding the Lynch home; and his phone records reveal that all his conversations were made while in New York, or from his desk in the newsroom (Witnesses and documents, 2003, May 11). It then came as no surprise, neither Blair's co-writer nor his cameraman, both of whom were stationed outside the Lynch home, had any recollection of ever seeing him at the location. Jayson Blair will never be numbered amongst the shining examples of journalism, but is he truly an aberration, or is he perhaps more representative than we would like to believe? Blair's former boss, ousted Times Executive Editor, Howell Raines, cited problems of pervasive "lethargy and complacency" and "manana (man-yana) journalism" (Teather, D.; 2004) as being common place at the paper. Thus Blair's fall may actually indicate the failures of decaying leadership at the Times and even the fostering of a culture of deceit. More than a year before his separation from the paper, Blair's routine mistakes and unprofessional behavior were so widely known that newsroom administrators received a warning from Metropolitan Editor, Jonathan Landman, "We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times right now"(Goldman &Getlin; 2003). With such awareness, how did so many editors overlook him sitting at his newsroom desk,