THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PLAGIARISM

By: Mark Fitzgerald Why Writers Do It





this story is part of a special report on plagiarism from this week's
Editor & Publisher magazine. To subscribe, click here.



by Mark Fitzgerald



If newspapers covered plagiarism like any other sort of theft, it
would make some of the most entertaining reading in the police
blotter. For though plagiarism is undoubtedly a serious journalistic
offense with grave consequences for both the plagiarizer and the
paper, the incidents themselves frequently play out like a
liquor-store burglary bungled by the dimmest crook in the demimonde.



There was the time in 1992 a Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram
editorial writer used an unattributed passage from a New York Times
opinion piece in his own unsigned editorial. Nobody might have
noticed - except the Star-Telegram ran the Times piece on its Op-Ed
page the same day as the editorial.



Then there was the veteran drama critic for The Columbian in Vancouver,
Wash., who turned in a review of a 1996 dinner-theater production of
'Other People's Money'' that was a verbatim copy of Roger Ebert's
review of the 1991 film, with only the names of the cast members
changed. The critic got tripped up because the character Ebert
described as a 'tall blonde'' in the film was played by a short
brunette in the play.



Even The New York Times can get goofy.



Back in 1991, the newspaper reported that the dean of Boston
University's journalism school had plagiarized part of his
commencement speech. A few days later, the Times acknowledged that
its story on the incident was 'improperly dependent'' on a Boston
Globe account.



No good answer to 'Why?'



Whatever its details, almost every instance of newspaper plagiarism
that comes to light sounds so, well, boneheaded that one question
immediately comes to mind: What the hell was this guy or gal thinking?



It's a question that never gets a satisfactory answer. Journalists
caught plagiarizing typically explain that they 'mixed up'' notes
from elsewhere with their own work or they were just 'using the
framework'' of somebody else's work or they were paralyzed by a
looming deadline.



'You listen to the explanations they give, and they don't explain
anything,'' says veteran Chicago journalist George Harmon, now an
associate professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of
Journalism. 'That's the mystery. Nobody knows why this happens. The
people themselves don't know why they did it. I think they're trying
to give an honest answer - and they can't. Maybe it's just one of
those mysteries of the brain.''



Maybe it is, but psychologists admit they don't have any better
insight into what motivates plagiarizers than anyone else. Purdue
University Professor of Psychology Stuart Offenbach is nationally
known for his work on ethics, and has commented on the effect plagiarism
has on its victims. Yet he concedes: 'I don't really have much to say
about the roots of why someone plagiarize - in part because I don't
understand them.''



More than a dozen psychologists were contacted for this story, and
though they work at universities - where age-old worries about student
plagiarism have only grown with the Internet - none could say with
certainty there was any research going on into why people plagiarize. Psychiatrists aren't even sure it's a sickness.



Plagiarism 'is not in any conventional psychiatric taxonomy'' and
doesn't show up in psychiatry's authoritative 'Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,' says Dr. Nathan Weed, an
expert in psychological testing at the University of Mississippi.



Perhaps, as with many human behaviors, plagiarism is better explained
by a novelist than a psychologist. Thomas Mallon, best known these
days for his historical novels, such as 'Henry and Clara'' and the
recently published 'Two Moons,'' examined plagiarism in a 1989
nonfiction book, 'Stolen Words.'' He favors the notion, first advanced
about 20 years ago in an American Scholar article by Peter Shaw, that
plagiarism is a form of kleptomania.



'The most striking thing is there's this lack of need to do it,''
Mallon says. 'Just as kleptomania tends to be a crime of upscale
people - the woman slipping a can of soup into her fur coat -
frequently what you notice about plagiarists is that they are
themselves talented people, and it's not a question of their being
unable to produce.''



Certainly that's true of newspaper plagiarism, which typically is
committed not by novices but by experienced journalists who have
earned senior positions. Columnist Mike Barnicle, probably this era's
poster boy for plagiarism and fabrication despite his stout denials,
had been writing for 25 years when the Boston Globe forced him to
resign.



He's the rule, not the exception.



The critic who cribbed Roger Ebert had been writing at The Columbian
for 24 years. A Fort Worth Star-Telegram political reporter who
resigned in 1991 after he was discovered lifting unattributed quotes
had 13 years on the paper. At the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press, a
drama critic was in his 10th year on the job when a reader noticed
that parts of a review were taken word for word from a critique Frank
Rich wrote when the play opened in New York six years earlier.
Plagiarism has brought down columnists at such major papers as the
Star-Telegram, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Arizona Republic in Phoenix,
and The Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel.



It's not flattering



'To me, it's a puzzling thing for a columnist to do,'' says syndicated
columnist Bob Greene of the Chicago Tribune. 'You've got to have a lot
of confidence if you're going to do this job, and when you steal
somebody's work, what you're saying is, you're not good enough to do
that job. ... The other thing is, you're basically torpedoing your
career, so it would seem to me much better to just do a mediocre
column, because you're going to get caught.''



Over the years, three or four people have been caught plagiarizing
Bob Greene. And for all the talk about the Internet as the new tool
for plagiarists, in the most recent episode a year ago, a newspaper
writer took something from 'American Beat,'' a book Greene wrote in
1983.



'The first time it happened, I was younger - and I was furious,'' he
says. 'At that point in my career, I was trying hard to get a foothold
and I thought, 'How could you do that to me?' Now I feel sorry for
them. ... In an odd way, you feel sort of flattered that they think
your work is worth stealing.''



Don't tell that to Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Andrea Tortora. 'People
say that it's flattering. It's certainly not,'' she says. When she was
editor of The Post, an independent student paper at Ohio University
in 1995, Tortora wrote a 'Shop Talk at Thirty'' article for E&P - only
to find its lede show up a few months later in a column in Kent State University's newspaper.


To Tortora's frustration, the plagiarist for weeks refused to
acknowledge his theft. In a 'Twilight Zone' kind of coda to the whole
episode, a couple of years later the plagiarist applied for a job at
the Enquirer - and, because the reporter was out for the day, was
assigned Tortora's desk for his tryout. (He didn't get the job,
perhaps because Tortora informed her editor of his past.)



'It's a very odd feeling'' to be plagiarized, Tortora says. 'Have
you ever had your home robbed or your car broken into? It's like
that. ... It gave me no sympathy for others who do it.''



What do plagiarists themselves say about what they did?



No journalist with plagiarism in his or her past would talk about
it for this story, obviously still uncomfortable or embarrassed,
even though their mistakes all predate the Clinton administration.
One explained that soon after his plagiarism was exposed, he talked
to a journalism class and found himself falling back into the same rationalizations and equivocations that led to the plagiarism. 'It
made me feel very uncomfortable,'' the person, who still works as a
journalist, said.



Novelist Mallon, again citing Peter Shaw's kleptomania theory, says
he's convinced that plagiarism has its compulsive aspect, and that
if a writer does it once, he'll do it again. 'What Shaw says is
that, after a while, the thrill of getting away with it,'' Mallon
says, 'can at some point be replaced with the thrill of getting
caught.''









~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~





Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com) is editor at
large for E&P.







(c) Copyright 2000, Editor & Publisher