Joseph M. Adelman: The Complicated History of Journalistic Plagiarism

Joseph M. Adelman is a historian of the politics and media of the American Revolution. He is a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the American Antiquarian Society.

The past few weeks have given rise to a new round of hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing in journalism circles with two more plagiarism scandals. In the first, Jonah Lehrer of The New Yorker was caught fabricating quotes of Bob Dylan [note to self: don’t mess with icons with large fan bases, they’ll figure it out every time] and then international relations pundit Fareed Zakaria was found to have lifted material for an op-ed piece from a Jill Lepore essay in The New Yorker. Both of these cases are serious, and are clear violations of modern standards of journalistic ethics (in their own ways).

However, these scandals and others like them can make teaching the history of journalism more difficult. Students, trained by their reading and their writing centers to sniff out plagiarism in their own work, instantly see it everywhere in the newspapers of the past (when they don’t also encounter rampant “bias,” that is). I want my students to understand the concept well enough that they don’t commit the act in their own work, but as in many areas students want to read the present back into the past. Seeing the historical context is difficult for students, and understanding that plagiarism itself has a history, and it doesn’t run the same course in every field of the written word....