Ethics Newsline®

In the mid-1980s, I was Feature editor at The Christian Science Monitor when one of our young writers did a story on Maine blueberries. It was ready to goscheduled, edited, and laid outwhen the food editor showed up at my desk. She had the blueberry article’s text in one hand and an old cookbook in the otheropened to a page where, word for word, was the young writer’s story. No quotation marks. No attribution. Just the words, identically.

I recalled that incident when The Weekly Standard magazine published articles last month about two prominent historians, Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, caught plagiarizing. Careful readers had spotted passages in their well-respected books that, word for word, kidnapped (the root meaning of “plagiarize”) the words of previous historians and passed them off as original.

Mr. Ambrose apologized graciously and immediately, calling it inadvertent. But he never explained how the plagiarism happened. Ms. Goodwin also apologized, admitting that fifteen years ago her publisher had settled with the author from whom she borrowed, Lynne Taggart, for an undisclosed sum. But she kept that fact silent until forced last month to admit it. As part of the settlement, Ms. Goodwin added numerous notes to the paperback version of her bestseller, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. Mr. Ambrose says he’ll correct future editions of his works.

Cases closed? Perhaps. Both historians are striding onward, still making important contributions to our sense of the past. But what should the public make of the ethics of all of this?

Start by dismissing three lesser issues. The first is the idea that ownership of property is old-fashioned — that in the electronic age plagiarism is obsolete, since every created thing should belong to everyone. This notion conjures up bizarre analogies: Is every car, for instance, to be driven away by anyone who needs it, regardless of whether somebody else’s grandmother is in the back seat? More important, this argument would eviscerate creativity. If all art can be freely appropriated, it’s commercially worthless. And if nobody can make a living from art, only the comfortably rich or the deliberately impoverished will be creative.

Second is the argument that plagiarism doesn’t count as long as the intent is not to steal. As with shoplifting, that argument carries some weight in sentencing offenders but little in determining their guilt. Whatever the motive, the deed has been done. Punishment having been promised, it ought to be extracted. Otherwise, arguments about intent only grease the slippery slope into the land of careless, lazy, and unpunished literary theft.

Third, there’s the argument that publishers wants popular books unencumbered by footnotes. Yes, the scholarly world is drowning in a swamp of citations. But there’s a better way out of this box: Write lively prose of your own. Writers who can’t do that should settle for modest sales.

That brings us to Ms. Goodwin’s argument, presented winningly and gracefully on the PBS television network’s “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” last week, that her technique got in her waythat fifteen years ago, writing this book, she took notes longhand and interspersed quotes from others with her own writing. That explains how plagiarism can happen. But historians, like bankers, are professionals. Would you trust a banker who, having “inadvertently” mingled your money with that of another client, pleaded poor technique and an inability to keep the funds straight? For a banker, skill with a ledger is a core competency. Similarly, for a historian to know who said what to whomand whether you or someone else said itis no mere optional talent. It’s a central, bread-and-butter task.

Why does all this matter? Because writing, like life, is a matter of trust and consistency. We learn to have confidence in writers not because we track down every footnote ourselves but because we assume they have. Once that consistency is broken, so is the trust. And then everything gets called into question.

Back at the Monitor, we couldn’t look the other way. Yes, that young writer was strugglingwith health, with stress about her weekly quota, with ambition to move beyond food writing. But in the end our loyalty had to be to our readers. It was an issue of trust: We represented to them that our published words were original, and they gave us their confidence in return. And we could never again be sure of that young writer’s work.

So she moved on to a nonwriting position. But then, she had no established reputation. Is there a double standard? When the well-known plagiarize, they quietly settle. When ordinary folks plagiarize, they get dismissed from college or sent packing by their employers. If plagiarism matters, plagiarists in high places owe us more than partial explanations, emended reprintings, and apologies extracted under duress. If plagiarism doesn’t matter, then those in low placesfreshmen English students, for instanceshould be allowed to copy away merrily. In which world do we want to live?

(c)2002 by the Institute for Global Ethics