Words belong to the person who wrote them. There are few simpler ethical notions than this one.
In the past thirty years, copyright laws have been strengthened. In the worlds of academia and publishing, plagiarism has gone from being bad literary manners to something much closer to a crime.
Those first two paragraphs? I didn't write them, Malcolm Gladwell did. In his 2004 New Yorker essay ""Something Borrowed,"" he discusses his experience being plagiarized and examines our cultural abhorrence of any form of intellectual larceny, how it can lead to dangerous thinking and poses the fundamental question, ""Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life?""
Had I failed to give Gladwell credit, I would deservingly be called a liar and a fraud. Plagiarism is as destructive a sin as you'll find in journalism, robbing publications of their credibility and depriving readers of the basic belief in truth that enables trust and faith in the profession. But as Gladwell notes, we've been conditioned to react to the theft of even 10 words of generic prose with apocalyptic outcry and gnashing of teeth.
And knee-jerk reactions to claims of uncredited copying can lead to overreactions and failure to closely examine how much, if any, of a crime was actually committed.
The Daily Cardinal ran the opinion column ""Keeping ‘Mama Grizzly' hidden is bad for voters"" by Melissa Grau in its Oct. 8 edition. It essentially argued that attempts to shade Lt. Governor hopeful Rebecca Kleefisch from public view during her campaign insults and cheats Wisconsin voters.
Just hours after it hit newsstands, the Cardinal received an e-mail from Isthmus contributor Alicia Yager, who had written the news feature ""Rebecca Kleefisch, stealth Mama Grizzly"" a week earlier.
She had noticed the articles were strikingly similar in theme and relied on many of the same facts. Yager said parts seemed almost directly pulled from her piece and requested attribution to the Isthmus article.
Read the stories side-by-side, and it's hard to blame her.
The Cardinal reacted swiftly, adding the Isthmus attribution to the online article and including a lengthy special correction in the next issue. There were murmurs of ""plagiarism"" and even discussion about whether the writer should be asked to leave the staff.
The hasty reaction isn't hard to understand—a newspaper doesn't want allegations of copying to linger.
But was it the right reaction? Let's examine the facts.
The Cardinal article was not conceived by Grau, but rather by one of her editors, who had not seen the Isthmus piece.
Knowing little about Kleefisch, Grau began researching her for the article. Grau admitted she indeed came upon the Isthmus story, but only after her article was nearly complete. Her source file, which she compiles for every column to fact-check, reveals a variety of places she drew information from.
There are many similarities—the general concept of Kleefisch staying hidden, how Kleefisch's website redirects to Walker's, how she avoids the press, her Palin-esque tweets and the notion that she could have a similar impact on the Walker campaign as Palin did on McCain's—but these are simply facts and ideas.
You cannot plagiarize a fact or an idea, only someone's personal expression of one.
There is no direct copying of Yager's language or expression, so by almost any definition, the article could not be considered intellectual theft.
The very idea both authors choose to take up—why Kleefisch remaining hidden matters—would inherently draw them to a limited set of facts. Kleefisch stays out of the media, so it's hardly surprising they would come across similar material while researching their respective articles.
Grau's article could not be called a fraud, though it could labeled unoriginal. But unoriginality is as common to journalism as newsprint. Stories are rehashed, repackaged and localized daily. In opinion pieces like Grau's, topics are retread perhaps even more frequently—it's the personal analysis and position that matters.
Though no direct copying occurred, crediting Yager for arriving at the idea first, especially considering their similarities, would have eliminated any appearance of misdeed. If there was a mistake made in Grau's article, that was it.
But this mistake is a far cry from intellectual theft, and it rests on the Cardinal editors as much as it does the author.
Student newspapers are about making mistakes and learning from them. The Cardinal considers itself a learning institution and no one should ever be asked to leave for an honest mistake.
In their haste to distance the Cardinal from a potentially embarrassing incident, editors lost sight of the facts and used a gun to remedy a problem that could be fixed with a fly swatter.
Adding an attribution to the Isthmus on the online article is a reasonable measure, but running a special three-paragraph apology in print that says the article could have used a ""complete overhaul"" is both unusual and unwarranted.
It alienates a Cardinal staff writer who should be provided constructive support and critique, not rebuked and embarrassed for making a mistake.
Alex Morrell was editor-in-chief of the Cardinal from 2008-2009 and is a reporter for the Green Bay Press-Gazette.
