Recycling in The Newsroom

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Every schoolchild is taught the impropriety of claiming credit for someone else's work. But in adult life, the rules on plagiarism are often hazily understood, even by those whose trade is to point the finger. Within a six-day span this month, the nation's two leading dailies, the New York Times and the Washington Post, confessed to plagiarizing stories from rival papers and disciplined the guilty reporters, while the journalism school at Boston University replaced its dean, H. Joachim Maitre, after he lifted much of his commencement speech from an obscure journal.

Officials at all three institutions assured the public that these were isolated episodes. But the misdeeds by the reporters from the Times and the Post were simply more extreme examples of corner-cutting practices that are becoming regrettably common. Technology provides ever easier access to other journalists' stories. Financial pressures impel sheer productivity. Reporters see career advancement coming through literary stylishness or Watergate-type exposes instead of nuts-and-bolts checking. And editors at even the most prominent places increasingly call themselves "packagers" rather than seekers of news. Thus it is scant surprise that even experienced reporters make bad judgments.

Fox Butterfield of the Times went awry, ironically, in reporting the Maitre plagiarism flap. After the story broke in the Boston Globe, he retold it in a next-day version, more elegantly written and with some fresh reporting. But Butterfield had no reason to doubt the accuracy of the quotes in the Globe. So instead of buying a videotape of Maitre's speech, as the article implied he had, he took the quicker route of plucking the words straight from the daily. He also borrowed the Globe's choices for side-by-side comparisons of passages by Maitre and PBS film critic Michael Medved. Butterfield presumably reasoned his time would be better spent advancing the story by pursuing new information. Instead, he was publicly rebuked in a Times Editors' Note; he declined interviews last week while reportedly on a one-week suspension.

Laura Parker, chief of the Washington Post's Miami bureau, took the shortcut principle even further in filing a piece about mosquito and grasshopper infestations in Florida. She lifted most of her reporting from stories by the Miami Herald and the Associated Press, including direct quotations from people she had not interviewed. She presumably saw little point in the donkey work of calling the quoted sources, or hunting up counterparts, to provide innocuous remarks. In the mind of her editors, however, she broke an implicit contract with the reader, in which the newspaper vouches that all its facts, especially those surrounded by quotation marks, have been checked for accuracy by the newspaper itself. So they fired her. Parker declined to comment beyond a prepared statement: "I made a mistake, which I deeply regret. My integrity and ethics have never been questioned in my 16 years in journalism, and I think I was very harshly punished."

Whenever a news organ disciplines a reporter, cynics suggest that management is seeking a public relations gesture, a formal rooting out of sin. But the issue is the First Amendment bond with the public. Plagiarism imperils that bond, not because it involves theft of a wry phrase or piquant quote, but because it devalues meticulous, independent verification of fact -- the bedrock of a press worth reading.

With reporting by Minal Hajratwala/New York