What were you smoking, Fareed Zakaria?

The Washington Post story that went viral today. Read it here.

Also read:

• "Plagiarism: Check out the facts"

• "The plagiarism case that shook the New York Times to its foundations"

• "The India Today plagiarism scandal"

Plagiarism: Check out the facts

Imagine! Jonah Lehrer, the author of the New York Times bestseller, Imagine: How Creativity Works, has been exposed as a plagiarist. And print and e-book copies of the book are now being pulled from distribution, according to Mark Nichol, editor of the Daily Writing Tips blog. "Like most individuals," Nichol writes, "who have been part of an early twenty-first-century wave of high-profile literary fabricators and plagiarists, his promising career as a writer is over."

Nichol, while explaining that he would prefer to leave the psychology of motivation for such invention to others to analyse, offers some interesting observations on media "criticisms that book publishers do not double-check facts".

He writes:

One of the fundamentals of journalism is veracity in reporting, and most periodical publications consider assiduous research and fact-checking integral to professional reporting and writing. Some professionally produced publications — including mostly magazines but some newspapers as well — employ staff or freelancers responsible for conducting research and contacting sources to verify quotations and quantifiable information, even though it is the reporter's or writer's responsibility to submit accurate content.

But lapses occur constantly: I’ve edited for several newspapers and magazines that, like many other periodicals, often have a space to acknowledge and correct significant factual errors. I’ve also read newspaper or magazine articles about incidents or events with which I was intimately familiar, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is a given that even the most well-written article will get something wrong.

Nichol then offers practical advice on the use of quotations:

It’s one thing to slightly alter a quotation for grammatical effect or because the original statement was elliptical and requires more context, or to rebuild one from incomplete notes. It’s one thing to restate another person’s opinions or conclusions (which might themselves not be original). These are acceptable, standard practices.

It’s another thing to slide down the slippery slope of thinking that it’s too much trouble to contact sources to coax them into saying what you want them to say — just reconstruct a conversation from random comments and punctuate it with a bon mot in your source’s voice that she would have said if she had thought of it. It’s another thing to agonise that your article or essay or book is lacking, and to rationalise that the only way to remedy the shortcoming is to invent or copy.

And he then adds the perfect conclusion:

Whether it comes to contemplating bank robbery or writing, opt for earning your money the hard way — honestly.

Read the article in its entirety here: "The Facts Are Good Enough".

Also read:

• "The plagiarism case that shook the New York Times to its foundations".

• "What were you smoking, Fareed Zakaria?" 

• "The India Today plagiarism scandal"

And for those who are not clear about what plagiarism is exactly, here's a primer: "What is plagiarism?"

Plagiarism is okay, says DNA executive editor in an apology for a column

R. Jagannathan, executive editor of DNA, writing in the newspaper today on the Edit Page, has the temerity to suggest that there is an upside to plagiarism.

First, he feels sorry for Aroon Purie, who copied two paragraphs from an article in Slate and used them in his "Letter from the Editor" column in India Today. Jagannathan writes: "I'm sure Aroon Purie, editor-in-chief of India Today, is embarrassed that his lines on Rajinikanth were 'lifted' from Grady Hendrix's article in Slate.com."

Aroon Purie? Embarrassed? How is Jagannathan "sure" about this? And is embarrassment all Purie should feel as the editor-in-chief of the country's biggest magazine-publishing group who was caught with his hand in the cookie jar?

Second, and this is where I almost lost it, Jagannathan writes: "Grady [the author of the Slate article] protests too much. He is the one true beneficiary in all this, for plagiarism is the ultimate form of flattery. When you quote somebody's work and attribute it, you are merely acknowledging the source. But when you lift a passage out of someone's myriad outpourings and pass it off as your own, you are paying him the ultimate tribute. You find the lines so good that you wished you had written it yourself."

I couldn't believe what I was reading. Was this DNA's idea of a joke? Surely, this is a sarcastic piece, I thought. But no, as I continued reading I realised Jagannathan is serious.

Though he has the good sense to begin the very next paragraph, the third, by asserting that "this is not an invitation to Indians to copy someone else's intellectual output with a clear conscience. We Indians have to learn to respect copyright, as we are too blasé about stealing", he ruins it all by writing in the same paragraph that "plagiarism does have real (positive) spinoffs: it speeds up the spread of knowledge at the cost of slightly retarding innovation".

Huh?

After the paid news and private treaties programmes initiated by the country's largest media company, plagiarism is the biggest danger to the future of journalism, especially in India where, as Jagannathan admits, "we are too blasé about stealing".

So do we want young journalists and would-be journalists to think that plagiarism is okay because it is "the ultimate form of flattery" and it has "real (positive) spinoffs"?

Shame on you, Jagannathan, for trying to suggest that stealing is okay and then making things worse by telling readers that that is how "our pharma and software prowess was established". I am no expert on our pharma or software prowess, but as a journalist with more than 25 years in the profession, I am appalled that a columnist with a national newspaper is hinting that plagiarism is the way to go if we want better journalists and newspapers.

Shame on DNA, too, for publishing this drivel.

• Contrast Jagannathan's article with the one written by Aditya Sinha, the editor-in-chief of The New Indian Express, who was the first media honcho to comment on the Purie scandal. An excerpt:

The buck stops at the top... and it will take time for Purie to live down this stupid-mistake-by-stupider-underlings. But that’s good, in a way, if it occasions some introspection and forces some self-regulation. India Today has been charged with plagiarism too many times lately; just ask Canada-based blogger Niranjana Iyer or Anshuman Rane of the UK digiterati. It’s not a coincidence that these victims were foreign-based and that their work appeared online. It seems Indian journalists think that they are immune given a blogger’s distance from an Indian court and the fact the cyber-universe is so vast that the readership of a particular online article is often limited. No apologies have ever been offered to either of these two, by the way, and the culprits roam free to plagiarise again. Similarly, the Times of India film critic, Nikhat Kazmi, lifted from the legendary Roger Ebert for her review of Shark Tale, yet she remains at work for India’s largest media company.

Read the no-punches-pulled column here: "Plagiarise and be damned".

• DNA readers have also pilloried Jagannathan for this particular column. Here are two comments from the newspaper's website:

padma srihari from Bangalore

Mr.J,
I am appalled by your moral ambivalence. Aroon Purie STOLE. You are supporting him because you do the same. Filthy little cheats!

Posted on: Nov 4, 2010 7:42 IST

Bubloo Mookerjee from Ahmedabad

Hilarious, isn't it? At the end of an article extolling the virtues of copying is a line saying copyright permission mandatory to republish this article!

Posted on: Nov 5, 2010 22:26 IST

• EXTERNAL READING: Outlook editor Krishna Prasad has also published a blog post on Jagannathan's column: ‘Plagiarists speed up the spread of knowledge’.

Copying and pasting. And an apology — of sorts — from India Today.

An apology from none less than Aroon Purie.

Here is the opening paragraph of his "From the editor-in-chief" column in the latest issue of India Today (Oct. 25):

Jet lag is clearly injurious to the health of journalism. I was in America and still a bit bleary-eyed and sleep-deprived when we took an unusual decision: to split the cover. This is jargon for changing the cover for some editions; so while the content of the magazine remained the same worldwide, the cover that went to our readers in South India displayed the phenomenal Rajinikanth while our other readers saw Omar Abdullah on the cover. This meant writing two versions of 'Letter from the Editor'. Not being an acknowledged expert on the delightful southern superstar, I asked Delhi for some inputs. Unfortunately a couple of sentences lifted from another article were sent to me. An excuse is not an explanation. So, without any reservations, mea culpa. Apologies.

Now here's the opening paragraph from Purie's piece in the Oct. 18 issue:

Jackie Chan is the highest-paid actor in Asia, and that makes sense. Besides producing, directing, and starring in his own action movies since 1980, he's earned millions in Hollywood with blockbusters like Rush Hour and The Karate Kid. But the No. 2 spot goes to someone who doesn't make any sense at all. The second-highest-paid actor in Asia is a balding, middle-aged man with a paunch, hailing from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and sporting the kind of moustache that went out of style in 1986. This is Rajinikanth, and he is no mere actor—he is a force of nature. If a tiger had sex with a tornado and then their tiger-nado baby got married to an earthquake, their offspring would be Rajinikanth. Or, as his films are contractually obligated to credit him, "SUPERSTAR Rajinikanth!" If you haven't heard of Rajinikanth before, you will when you watch his latest movie Endhiran: The Robot which has just opened in movie theatres around the world. It's the most expensive Indian movie of all time. It's getting the widest global opening of any Indian film ever made, with 2,000 prints exploding onto screens simultaneously. Yuen Wo-ping (The Matrix) did the action, Stan Winston Studios (Jurassic Park) did creature designs, George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic did the effects, and Academy Award-winning composer A.R. Rahman (Slumdog Millionaire) wrote the music. It's a massive investment, but the producers fully expect to recoup that, because this isn't just some film they're releasing; this is a Rajinikanth film.

FROM INDIA TODAY (SOUTHERN EDITION), OCT. 18

And here are the opening two paragraphs from an article written by Grady Hendrix for the online magazine Slate:

Jackie Chan is the highest-paid actor in Asia, and that makes sense. Besides producing, directing, and starring in his own action movies since 1980, he's earned millions in Hollywood with blockbusters like Rush Hour and The Karate Kid. But the No. 2 spot goes to someone who doesn't make any sense at all. The second-highest-paid actor in Asia is a balding, middle-aged man with a paunch, hailing from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and sporting the kind of moustache that went out of style in 1986. This is Rajinikanth, and he is no mere actor—he is a force of nature. If a tiger had sex with a tornado and then their tiger-nado baby got married to an earthquake, their offspring would be Rajinikanth. Or, as his films are contractually obligated to credit him, "SUPERSTAR Rajinikanth!"

If you haven't heard of Rajinikanth before, you will on Oct. 1, when his movie Enthiran (The Robot) opens around the world. It's the most expensive Indian movie of all time. It's getting the widest global opening of any Indian film ever made, with 2,000 prints exploding onto screens simultaneously. Yuen Wo-ping (The Matrix) did the action, Stan Winston Studios (Jurassic Park) did creature designs, George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic did the effects, and Academy Award-winning composer A.R. Rahman (Slumdog Millionaire) wrote the music. It's a massive investment, but the producers fully expect to recoup that, because this isn't just some film they're releasing; this is a Rajinikanth film.

So, that's not just "a couple of sentences" that were lifted. That's almost all of the first two PARAGRAPHS. About 250 words were copied and pasted.

Three questions come to mind now:

1. Even if the "inputs" were sent by "Delhi", did they have to be reproduced word for word?

2. Is the person who sent the "inputs" still an employee of India Today?

3. Does Aroon Purie really write the "letter from the editor" column week after week after week?

PS: As is to be expected, Purie has got hell from the writer whose work was plagiarised. "Any man can apologize," Grady Hendrix wrote yesterday in an article for Slate titled Great Writers Steal, "but only the millionaire CEO of a multiplatform media company who is also editor-in-chief of a major news magazine can write an apology that is defiantly nonapologetic."

There's more in the same vein:

This official apology blamed jetlag for the theft, and if that's the case then my heart does go out to Mr. Purie's staff. If this is a man suffering from a narco-klepto disorder (also known as "sleep stealing") then he must be watched vigilantly. Every yawn is a signal to lock up your laptops, every announced nap is a sign that your wallet could suddenly go missing. But the jetlag apology wasn't meant to be taken as a serious statement, it was more of an old school attempt to make the problem go away with a silly, "Whoops, I'm tired!" shrug. Only with the new media, problems like this don't go away. While print journalists in India are said to be unlikely to report on the infractions of their colleagues, the Internet knows no loyalty, and all over India online writers are still tweeting and blogging for a better explanation. 

Hendrix also reproduces the letters Purie wrote to him and to the editor of Slate. And he says at the end, "...as far as I'm concerned this is a satisfactory close to the matter".

But is it? Plagiarism is the bane of journalism and it is unlikely that either his competitors or his readers will forgive Aroon Purie — precisely because he's the editor-in-chief of India's first major English news magazine and the largest-selling — for this blatant transgression.

***
'She copied my article and it was sent back to my magazine as her feature!'

Shagorika Easwar, editor of the Toronto-based Desi News and CanadaBound Immigrant comments: You know, recently, I received an article on heart health from Maharaja Features. It seemed strangely familiar. The more I read, the more it seemed like I had read it before. And then it dawned. It was an article I had written on the subject a few years ago! Their feature writer lifted it word for word, with just two changes. Where I had written about spotting people jogging along Lakeshore Boulevard, she 'saw' them on Bandra Bandstand. She also changed the name of one of the people quoted in the article. Other than that, it was exactly as is. Including the intro para that began with now that heart-shaped candy boxes had been put away, it was time to get serious about heart health. That made sense in March, the month we ran it, after Valentine's Day. They sent the article in August, when  you have to wonder which heart-shaped candy boxes were being put away.

I wrote to Mr KRN Swamy of MF and he responded with something about how they would never use the lady's articles again. And that was that. (I should clarify here that I don't think Mr Swamy knew. His own articles on history and travel are meticulously researched with due credit given to sources. This was one of his feature writers and if it took me a few minutes to make the connection, I can hardly expect him to have remembered an article we carried a few years ago. He gets a copy of Desi News each month as we carry some of their features and she might have seen it there and tucked it away for future use!)

I thought that was bad enough, but this India Today case is shocking. And the man has the gall to try and shrug it off with a half-hearted apology that is more along the lines of "I'm sorry I got caught, BUT... " We all know that politicians have speech writers, that more often than not, the brave, inspiring words they spout were written by someone else. After seeing this, I begin to wonder if editors have ghost writers! Such a shame.

***
'This episode highlights the problems we all face today — delegation'

R. Umesh, partner in a Bangalore-based chartered accountancy firm, comments: A monumental gaffe indeed. But tell me, I don’t know how this works — how would one identify plagiarism anyway? I feel the only way this could have been avoided was for Aroon Purie to write the editorial himself (which is what I presume he should be doing in the first place), right?

This episode also highlights the problems that we all face today — delegation. Just to what extent can you delegate your work? If you cannot, then how do you handle workloads? I have no idea about Aroon Purie's workloads, but I am sure it must be high. This is why we become donkeys at work — because reliability today comes at a premium. This is what I refer to in office as the CR factor (C for capability and R for reliability).  I always say — If I were to choose between two chartered accountants for a job at our office, I would surely go for the one who is more reliable though less capable (even if that means I have to put in extra time).  Generally, you never find a person with the right combination.  In other words, this is the classic conundrum at many offices today. I sure don’t want to land up in Purie’s unenviable position.

***
'Is Indian media indifferent to plagiarism?'

Here is veteran journalist Bala Murali Krishna's take on the issue: "India Today’s plagiarism scandal".

Bala, who is now associate editor with The New Indian Express in Chennai and who taught journalism at Commits as guest faculty when he lived in Bangalore, makes an important point when he writes that the Purie "apology that is a non-apology, the unwillingness to explain the real circumstances of the incident and an unwillingness, over the years, to address other similar allegations, suggest a pattern of indifference at India Today that, embarrassingly, might be a proxy to the entire Indian media".

He then makes a comparison with American media:

The Washington Post stripped [Janet] Cooke of the Pulitzer, The New York Times ordered a complete audit of each and every word written by [Jayson] Blair and published in its editions, and made a determination of the extent of plagiarism and/or unethical practice. It also fired the blogger Zachery Kouwe, who had copied from the Wall Street Journal’s blogs. The Boston Globe, USA Today and others have responded in similar fashion, firing editors, writers and reporters found plagiarizing or indulging in unethical practices.

***
Now I think the only way Aroon Purie can redeem himself and salvage the reputation of India Today is by stepping down as editor-in-chief. But I am not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

• Also read: Why does plagiarism continue? And what can writers and editors do about it?

• And the DNA column that says plagiarism is okay because it is "the ultimate form of flattery" and it has "real (positive) spinoffs".

•  Aditya Sinha, the editor-in-chief of The New Indian Express, was the first media honcho to write about the Purie scandal. An excerpt:

The buck stops at the top... and it will take time for Purie to live down this stupid-mistake-by-stupider-underlings. But that’s good, in a way, if it occasions some introspection and forces some self-regulation. India Today has been charged with plagiarism too many times lately; just ask Canada-based blogger Niranjana Iyer or Anshuman Rane of the UK digiterati. It’s not a coincidence that these victims were foreign-based and that their work appeared online. It seems Indian journalists think that they are immune given a blogger’s distance from an Indian court and the fact the cyber-universe is so vast that the readership of a particular online article is often limited. No apologies have ever been offered to either of these two, by the way, and the culprits roam free to plagiarise again. Similarly, the Times of India film critic, Nikhat Kazmi, lifted from the legendary Roger Ebert for her review of Shark Tale, yet she remains at work for India’s largest media company.

Read the no-punches-pulled column here: "Plagiarise and be damned".

• Mitali Saran, who wrote a weekly column, Stet (Commitscions know what this means now), for Business Standard, dedicated her October 30 post to the Aroon Purie plagiarism scandal — but BS refused to print it. Now Saran has terminated her agreement with the newspaper. What did Saran write? And why did BS refuse to print the column? Read all about it here: "The case of the missing attribution".

• Niranjana Iyer, a writer and book critic based in Ontario, Canada, says India Today plagiarised her blog post and refused to respond.

• And India Today gets more flak, this time for its Goa cover story (November 6), from Vivek Menezes, the founding editor of "an online review of art, culture, news and opinion relating to Goa" — Tambdimati.com: "Another low for Aroon Purie".

The plagiarism case that shook the New York Times to its foundations

Go to this page for links to New York Times stories related to the Jayson Blair plagiarism case.

• The best book on the subject is Hard News, by Seth Mnookin. It's available in the Commits library. Hard News also gives you an amazing insight into how one of the world's great newspapers works.

• And here's the NYT's national editor Suzanne Daley (pictured) answering a reader's question about the case:

    The Legacy of Jayson Blair

Q. Is it too soon to ask about the legacy of Jayson Blair for the National Desk? Do you think The Times learned the right lessons? Is it possible for a news organization, stung so badly, to become too cautious in its pursuit of the news?
    — Donald Frazier, Denver
 

A. I don’t think anyone around here is going to thank Jayson Blair any time soon for the shame he brought to this institution. But much good came out of his deplorable behavior. His legacy permeates our newsroom.

    In the aftermath of Mr. Blair’s fabrications, we did a lot of soul searching and developed all sorts of new policies and training on ethics, conflict of interest, anonymous sourcing.

    We now have a public editor, Clark Hoyt, who takes in complaints from the public and publishes weekly critiques of our work. We also have a high-level editor inside the newsroom, who is responsible for standards and ethics. On top of that, each desk must track its errors and who made them. I get monthly summaries so I can identify the worst trespassers on the National Desk.

    We also decided to be a lot more transparent about who was contributing to the stories in our paper. When I started here, there were all kinds of crazy byline rules, grandfathered in long ago for who knows what reason. There was a policy, for instance, that you were only allowed one byline in the paper even if you had written two stories (even on the front page.) And only staff reporters could have bylines at all in the news sections. That meant a sizable number of stories had no bylines and a reader could not tell who wrote or reported them. Now, we spell it all out in sometimes lengthy contributor boxes.

    And we have increased our efforts to respond to the public with features like "Talk to the Newsroom."

    Have we become too cautious? Nope. Not in my book.

• For more Q&A with Suzanne Daley, go here. 

UPDATE (August 2, 2013): Commitscion ASWATHY MURALI (Class of 2015) has made the valuable suggestion that there should be something on the Reading Room blog about the hoax that shook the Washington Post to its foundations: "Jimmy's World", the story by Janet Cooke that won her a Pulitzer Prize but was later proved to be a fabrication. You can get all the details on "Story Lab", a very interesting blog published by the newspaper: Story pick: Janet Cooke and "Jimmy's World".

(What is Story Lab?  According to the "About" page, this is "where readers and reporters will come together to create and shape stories. Washington Post writers will talk about some of the hard choices involved in journalism". Read the description in its entirety here.)

Also read:

• "The problem of plagiarism"

• "The India Today plagiarism scandal — and an apology of sorts"

• "Plagiarism is okay, says DNA executive editor in an apology for a column"