Post Plagiarism Case: What was Sari Horwitz Thinking?

I've dug into plenty of plagiarism incidents involving reporters over the years, but I'll confess that I'm totally stumped by the case of Sari Horwitz.

Yesterday, the Washington Post issued an apologetic statement saying that two articles in the paper about the Arizona shooting rampage "contained substantial material that was borrowed and duplicated, without attribution, from The Arizona Republic newspaper."

The Post's apology didn't name the offending reporter or say what her punishment was. But it turned out to be Sari Horwitz, and she was suspended from the paper for three months.

Who is Sari Horwitz?

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Politics, Plagiarism, and Jane Mayer

During the heat of the 2008 presidential primary, I received a call from a writer working on a piece for the New York Times about a charge that Barack Obama had stolen language for a speech from Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. Obama had an edge over Hillary Clinton and there was a desperation to the charges, which seemed absurd to me. Clearly, though, the Clinton camp was praying that they were true and actively promoted this nonsense to the media.

Charges of plagiarism can badly damage careers in politics, as we saw in Colorado last fall with gubernatorial hope Scott McInnis in Colorado and with Arizona senate candidate Rodney Glassman. Looking back further, Joseph Biden's presidential bid in 1988 famously collapsed when it was revealed that he had borrowed passages from speeches by British Labour leader Neil Kinnock and other politicians, as well as plagiarized while in law school.

These days, you can bet that trying to spot plagiarism in a politician's past is a thriving subfield of opposition research.

But politically motivated charges of plagiarism can also be leveled against journalists, academics, and others. Laurence Tribe, the eminent liberal law professor at Harvard, was embarrassed in 2004 when the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, dug up evidence that he had used material from another author without proper attribution twenty years earlier. 

Now comes a case involving Jane Mayer, The New Yorker writer who has often staked out liberal positions. As reported by Keith Kelly in The New York Post last week:

For several weeks, the Daily Caller, a conservative Web site -- co-founded by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel, a former aide to former vice president Dick Cheney -- have had a reporter poking around what they thought would be a scandalous story about Mayer.

The allegations were serious -- that Mayer borrowed or plagiarized from a liberal blogger and other mainstream publications for an Aug. 30 smackdown in The New Yorker on the conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. In the end, even the Daily Caller found the allegations to be unfounded, and to its credit, abandoned the story.

Apparently, the investigation into Mayer's work was exhaustive, going beyond the Koch story and extending back a decade. For instance, the Daily Caller also raised questions about a 2002 article that Mayer wrote about SEC chairman Arthur Levitt.

It is not hard to imagine the origins of this smear effort, which emerged not long after Mayer's story on the Koch brothers. As Media Matters for America reports:

Foster Friess, a billionaire Republican donor who reportedly put up $3 million to help launch The Daily Caller, participated last summer in a secret strategy meeting in Aspen intended to help the conservative movement combat the "threats" posed by the Obama administration. The event, which included a lecture by Glenn Beck, was organized by Koch Industries and attended by the Koch brothers.

Tucker Carlson, in turn, is a senior fellow at the CATO Institute, which has been heavily backed by the Koch brothers. David Koch sits on the organization's board and has given CATO millions of dollars.

New Technology Helps Prevent Accidental Plagiarism

A number of authors and journalists caught up in plagiarism cases over recent years, including Doris Kearns Goodwin and Ruth Shalit, have argued that it was all an accident. Those claims resonate with anyone who has worked with large amount of research material in different electronic files, or with less-than-stellar research assistants.

Well, now there is a way to check your own work for plagiarism. The company iParadigms LLC, long a maker of plagiarism prevention software used by publishers and universities (it created Turnitin) has introduced a new service target at individual writers and researchers. You can check it out at research.ithenticate.com. The company describes the product this way:

Using the web-based interface, a user submits a document for comparison to iThenticate's extensive data repository. Within seconds, iThenticate produces a report that highlights content matches and provides links to significant text found within iThenticate's databases. 

Unlike other plagiarism detection services, iThenticate compares every submitted paper to a massive database of content from over 80,000 major newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, and books as well as a database of over 12 billion current and archived pages of web content. In addition, iThenticate checks materials from over 13,000 scholarly journals and more than 150 STM publishers.

That sounds like pretty good protection to me. And it's not crazily expensive, either -- just $50 for a manuscript of up to 25,000 words. That's small change given the damage that a plagiarism charge can do to a career.

Democratic Candidate Plagued With Charges of Plagiarism

As if running against John McCain in Arizona was not hard enough, Democratic nominee Rodney Glassman may now be facing a new uphill struggle: accusations of plagiarism. These accusations, moreover, reveal just how difficult it is becoming these days to bury these actions in the past: A student, working on his own dissertation, decided to pull Glassman's out from the library. What he read was, in his words, such a bad paper that he decided to post his thoughts about it on the internet. Days later, he received an anonymous tip that claimed Glassman had picked off entire passages of the work from other books.

A student took the advice and did a little bit more research on his own. Upon finishing his investigations, he noted that their were striking similarities between many passages from Glassman's University of Arizona dissertation and other works on the same subject. If the charges pan out, which Glassman has come out and denied, it could seriously impair his title of doctor and his respect in the eyes of the public.

While in the scheme of things a couple copied passages may seem relatively inconsequential, what is more important to note is that the impulse to plagiarize and cheat are very seldom one-time occurances. They are a way of thinking that can affect not only the way one researches and writes a paper, but quite possibly the manner in which one studies, formulates and implements policy. It may be near-impossible to win the trust of the general public with these charges hanging over one's head. Then again, if you break someone's trust (in this case, the University of Arizona and everyone who has ever referred to you as doctor), then it could be a little difficult to entrust you with public office.