Tom Scocca discusses some plagiarism that was done by a former New York Times editor:
There was no ambiguity about it; Abramson clearly and obviously committed textbook plagiarism. Her text lifted whole sentences from other sources word for word, or with light revisions, presenting the same facts laid out in the same order as in the originals. . . .
How did this arise? According to Scocca, “partly because she got significant facts wrong, in the galley version of her book . . .”
This reminds me of something that Thomas Basbøll and I noticed awhile ago, that plagiarism and factual error seem to go together:
We propose that plagiarism is a statistical crime. It involves the hiding of important information regarding the source and context of the copied work in its original form. Such information can dramatically alter the statistical inferences made about the work.
I think it’s no coincidence that Abramson had errors as well as plagiarism: When you as an author destroy the paper trail, it’s harder for you as well as others to keep track of what’s really happening. A similar thing happened with Brian Wansink in his notorious retracted papers: the connections between his actual data and what he reported were so tangled that it seemed that he himself had no idea what was real and what was not.
It’s hard enough to keep straight what is happening even if you carefully document everything. So no surprise that if you can’t even source the writing in your book, you’ll get the facts wrong.
Remember what happened to Ed Wegman when he copied from Wikipedia and garbled the results?
P.S. Scocca quotes a law professor defending the plagiarism, which is pretty funny given that so many prominent law professors have themselves been accused of plagiarism (for example, here, here, and here), without it seeming to do much to their careers.
I think Scocca nails it when he writes:
Whether or not there are separate classes of writing, with separate value, there are definitely separate classes of writers.
It’s not the status of the words that defines the offense, it’s the status of the person who originally wrote the words compared to the person who copied them. . . . Fareed Zakaria, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, Juan Williams—above a certain level, a public figure is immune to any real career consequences for stealing work from the lower castes.
We saw something similar in the case of mathematician Christian Hesse, who took material written by others and didn’t credit them. This was not plagiarizing because it was not the exact words that Chrissy copied, just content—but like Abramson, and for that matter Wegman, there was the same consequence that Chrissy by copying introduced errors into his writing. He didn’t take responsibility, and by not clearly labeling his sources he made it that much more difficult for readers to track down these stories.