Accidental plagiarism at the Times

It’s not a nudge, it’s not WMDs, and it’s not completely dropping the ball on a major political scandal involving your star reporter — but it is plagiarism, a big deal even when it’s by accident. The NYT learns its lesson and issues the correction:

An article in The Arts on Monday described the films of the Israeli director Amos Gitai, the subject of a retrospective by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. It included two paragraphs, about Mr. Gitai’s background and goals, that were virtually identical to a passage in an article by Michael Z. Wise in the August issue of Travel + Leisure magazine.

The Times reporter, who had portions of the electronic version of Mr. Wise’s article in his computer, inadvertently mingled them with his own notes from an interview with Mr. Gitai, and then used some of them in the Times article without attribution. The material from the magazine should have been credited to it.

Yes, it’s a frank and straightforward note, except for one thing: the reporter’s name, NYT star writer and editor, the Laventhol Award-winning Stephen Erlanger. Even I feel a little weird burying the name four paragraphs down. The Times links to the implicated article; the byline is prominently displayed at the top. So why not mention it? It seems odd. Even if that’s their habit and their policy, it still seems odd. It feels like a tired refrain but I’m gonna say it anyway: in a period where the Times has come under fire for the quality of reporting and skirting issues of accountability,* it is even more important to be vigilant about explicitly taking responsibility, which in this case includes Stephen Erlanger’s name. That extra bit of transparency does make a difference.

Corrections: 12/02/05 [NYT]
Dramatizing the Mideast’s Cacophony [NYT]

*I’m just going to go ahead and link to Jay Rosen‘s PressThink wholesale. It’s aaaaaall there.

Also: I didn’t mention Jayson Blair, for a reason: the water’s flown under the bridge and that feels very much in the past. Whatever struggles the Times has had since, I’m gonna release them from that albatross.

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