Sorry about the title. It was the closest I could come to “Shattered Glass.” The subhead is “Pulitzer winner. Lefty hero. Plagiarist.”
Chris Hedges is a reporter who apparently has been very busy for many years, in fact, according to this report by Christopher Ketcham he’s been so busy telling important things to the world that he hasn’t had time to do all his reporting and writing himself. Instead, he pulls things from newspaper articles, recent books, and even some classic Ernest Hemingway, and inserts this material into his own publications without attribution. He’s a Quentin Rowan of nonfiction.
Bits like this make it easy to dislike Hedges: “‘He was very unhelpful from the beginning, and very aggressive,’ said the fact-checker.” Also lots of unpleasant details that seem to make it clear that Hedges knew exactly what he was doing (“The Katz stuff was flat out plagiarism . . . At least twenty instances of sentences that were exactly the same. Three grafs where a ‘that’ was changed to a ‘which'”) despite his later, generic, I-must-have-kept-sloppy-notes excuses.
But I want to go beyond the easy moralizing (appropriate as it may be in this case) to focus on alternative behaviors. Cos I expect a lot of you are thinking right now: Who gives a poop about originality? If what Hedges was reporting is correct, and it’s important, who cares if it first appeared elsewhere? And if Hemingway’s words were good enough for Hemingway, why not for Hedges too? In short, if Hedges can make a beautiful and informative collage, why should we criticize him for it?
Sure, Hedges lied about it, and that’s not cool, but arguably that’s unavoidable given the convention that plagiarism is not allowed. Sort of like if you’re the mayor of a major midwestern city and happen to smoke crack. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s frowned upon, so you kinda have to deny it until (or even after) you’re actually caught with the stuff.
So here’s the deal, as I see it. No need for Hedges to do original reporting or original writing if he doesn’t feel like it. He has important things to tell the world (or, at least, his editors think so, which I guess is what’s relevant here). All he has to do is credit his sources. If he does a story about poverty in Camden, New Jersey, he can just link to the news article by Matt Katz that he’s using as a source, and write things such as, “As Matt Katz wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer . . .” If he’d like to sample the stylings of the great Ernest Hemingway, he can write, “The great Ernest Hemingway put it better than I ever could, when he wrote . . .”
That would work just fine, and it certainly shouldn’t bother any of you who feel that originality is overrated, etc.
So then the question arises, Why didn’t Hedges play it that way? Why didn’t he credit his sources. It’s almost as if he, or his editors, suspected that he, Hedges, didn’t have that much to add, almost as if he suspected that, if the readers of Harper’s magazine wanted to learn more about the problems of Camden, New Jersey, they’d be better off simply going to the original source. Almost as if he thought that, if people could choose between Hemingway’s words in a Hedges story, or Hemingway’s words in a Hemingway story, they’d prefer the latter.
Hmmm . . . interesting.
Let me conclude by returning to the general issue of nonfiction reporting. When we read nonfiction there is a chain of trust: we’re trusting the editor who trust the reporter who trusts his sources, etc. Ultimately lots of the details can, and will, be checked, and indeed we retain a lot of skepticism for books of the sociologist-hangs-out-with-gang-members genre that appear to be uncheckable. Is that where Chris Hedges wants to be?
As chessblogger Justin Horton wrote, in the context of a much less publicized example (an article on “Checkmating Alzheimer’s Disease” that appeared on a couple chess websites and a local news website in Alabama, but which contained tons of material copied from other sources but without links or any other acknowledgments),
You may be thinking along the lines of yes, of course this is plagiarism, but so what, this is some obscure article by some guy I’ve never heard of and will never hear of again, and if you’re telling me Chessbase and FIDE have no particular standards then you’re telling me something I already knew.
OK. Well the point to be made is this. Let us suppose that instead of passing off somebody else’s work as his own, [the journalist] said whose it was and linked to it.
If he did this:
(a) you could look at it, and evaluate it ;
(b) he couldn’t change it to suit himself.Changing it to suit himself is exactly what he’s done. . . .
This is an extraordinary way to go about one’s business. What it entails is somebody deliberately amending previously-published work [In a footnote, Horton writes: As it happens the original article doesn’t constitute a serious piece of research, but very obviously, we should be able to see it so that we can judge that for ourselves], and hiding the fact that he’s done so, in order to skew what it says to his own advantage. . . .
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we have proper standards in research, and why we do not go about tweaking, altering, plagiarising and misrepresenting other people’s work, and generally saying whatever suits us.
That’s the point. If you publish something, you have to assume somebody might read it. And if you’re making a claim, somebody might want to evaluate it. Indeed, as we’ve been discussing endlessly in this space during the past year, the fact that a claim is published, even in a respected and peer-reviewed outlet, should not be taken as enough of a reason to believe it. By burying the source, plagiarism impedes the possibility of vetting. Forget about stealing, creativity, and the other issues that come up in discussions of plagiarism. My concern is that lack of attribution, in any forum, impedes communication (see further discussion here and here). Which is, or should be, the point of publication in the first place.
P.S. This discussion makes me realize one more thing, which I’m pretty embarrassed to admit, but there you go. I often pull images off the web to illustrate my posts. From here on I will give the source when I do so. For example, my gremlin image came from here and my poof image came from a google search which possibly led to this page.
I offer an analogyfrom the real world of things.
Suppose one is manufacturing a high-tech product like a computer or a smartphone.
People who do this think about supply chains in which each element must add value, (build a chip, test, integrate, write software, etc). Companies constantly jostle over build-vs-buy decisions for both products and services, but in the long run, how much somebody gets paid tends to reflect the value-add. Of course, people love to create chains in which their efforts have no serious competitors, while their sources compete and their customers compete.
Example: long ago, people built proprietary minicomputers from simple components … and made a lot of money.
When microprocessors came in, companies (like Intel) captured much more of the value-add … and after a while, customers stopped paying a premium for a computer with standard components just because some vendor put their own label on it.
For a while, Intel and Microsoft occupied chokepoints in the PC value-chains. (Amusingly, each thought the other one was extracting too much of the $, and each sought to create alternatives. Microsoft encouraged non-Intel chip vendors, Intel encouraged UNIX variants, especially Linux.)
Integrating others’ written work into a coherent whole can offer serious value-add. but just using those works without attribution is like stealing all the components for a smartphone, adding very little real value on top, but getting all the money (or at least, notoriety. Although there are not exactly chokepoints in the world of ideas, awards and sometimes distribution channels have similar effects.)
In the world of things: one can build from scratch, one can use (and have to buy).
In the world of ideas, one can write from scratch, one can use (and ought to attribute) .. .but taking without attribution is a lot easier.
John:
Yes, that makes sense. Arguably someone like Hedges can add value by compiling existing reporting and writing and packaging it for the audience that reads The Nation, etc. But the fact that he hides his sourcing suggests that he himself does not believe that he adds such value.
I felt the same way about Ed Wegman. If he really felt it was ok to crib from Wikipedia and other people’s articles, why didn’t he just say so? For example, he could’ve said to the congressional committee, “As a general expert on computational statistics, I recognize that I am not an expert on this particular subject so I will point you to Wikipedia etc.” But he did not say that, which suggests to me that he did not believe that pointing to other people’s stuff would add much value.
Same with Doris Kearns Goodwin and all the others.
Andrew
I think the Wegman case differs in interesting but subtle ways from that of Hedges.
Hedges seems to have been presenting words of others as though they were his own, based on his own experience. As far as I can tell, the others’ had the real experiences and the stories may well have been accurate. As best as I can tell, when plagiarism happens in investigative journalism or its simulation, what’s copied is plausibly good, and plausibly within the plagiarizer’s expertise.
The Wegman Report was a bit different, because:
In order to create the conclusions they wanted, they were trying to establish the illusion of expertise in:
1) paleoclimate, especially tree rings
2) relevant climate literature, i.e., the important papers
3) social network analysis
In 1), they not only plagiarized a book by one of the scientists whose work they were trying to discredit it by inverting a key conclusion, i.e. a form of falsification that could not have been done if they quoted the book directly.
In 2) they plagiarized many papers, because they didn’t understand them, clear from some of the silly errors introduced.
For 3), they were trying to establish credibility for an SNA section … that they botched pretty badly to get the result desired.
There were a few other cases, some surprising, but that’s the general idea: plagiarism to simulate expertise in support of strong accusations elsewhere in the report, and to enable the falsification. This may be a rare sort of case, although I suppose might be an extreme version of the sort of thing students do, where a literature survey is supposed to mean one has actually surveyed the literature and digested the relevant pieces and can explain them. That’s like 2) above.
The Wegman+Said articles in WIREs:CS seemed to be more like the Hedges case, i.e., no particular axe to grind, just want to get articles without doing much work.
As a reminder, I continue on my campaign for finding better ways to display plagiarism so it jumps off the page. See 3-page PDF and DOC files, stirred by Andrew’s article here a while ago. I also recommend Debora Weber-Wulff’s False Feathers, a good recent book that describes much work done on plagiarism cases, with useful suggestions.
John:
Can you really say that Hedges had “no particular axe to grind”? I’ve never read any of his work so I can’t really say, but from Ketcham’s article, it appears that Hedges made his name as an ideological journalist.
That said, I still think David Brooks is worse than Hedges. In terms of journalistic ethics, Hedges is worse in that he appears to be flat-out lying about his plagiarism, but as you say, the material that Hedges copied seems to be accurate. Brooks isn’t violating any journalistic rules—he writes his own material and he seems scrupulously fair about crediting others—but he has a track record of publishing factual errors that suit his ideological agenda, and then never issuing corrections, instead lashing out at people who point out his errors.
I’d never read any of Hedges either, and he may well have political axes to grind, so maybe this was a bad choice of words. What I meant was that there was a clear political motivation behind the creation of the Wegman Report, and t required an illusion of expertise. A correct/competent report would not have produced the results Joe Barton wanted.
By contrast, correct/competent papers in WIRES:CS would have been just fine with everybody.
“Never admit an error” seems common to all 3.
I think there is a lot of straight-up plagiarism out there. I had a short piece appear in a few news outlets about one of my papers (here’s an example http://www.wired.com/2011/04/astrophoto-comet/ though this is not the key example, which I cannot find). One early story contained a trivial error (a wrong affiliation or somesuch) and it propagated through all of the subsequent stories. It was clear that after New Scientist and Wired (which did original reporting) almost all of the news sources were simply reporting what was written in previous articles, with no attribution whatsoever, including all mistakes. I got a new sense of the word “hack”.
You may also want to consider whether the images you’re using are copyrighted. Copyright law in the US is kind of nuts and it can’t hurt to be careful.
If you’re interested in finding images that are licensed for this sort of use, you can do a Google Image Search, click on “Search Tools” and then “Usage Rights”. Most of these images require attribution, but as long as you do that, you don’t run the risk of being sued.
It would be interesting to know how many journalists would get in trouble for this kind of thing if they too had made as many relentless, well-financed enemies as the pro-Palestinian Hedges:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hedges
Steve:
I dunno. After reading Ketcham’s article, I was surprised that Hedges lasted this long, given all the plagiarism that was already documented. I think the issue is that a journalist such as Hedges will end up with a hard-to-duplicate mix of skills, contacts, and reputation, to the extent that editors will continue to hire him even if they know about the plagiarism. Sort of like how Mike Barnicle and Gregg Easterbrook were able to hang around for so long: each in their own way was an excellent writer and added some value, despite their occasionally tenuous relationship with facts. Or, for that matter, sort of like how Bill Clinton stayed viable as a presidential candidate in 1992: sure, the Democrats would’ve preferred a candidate with all of Clinton’s skills and contacts but without the womanizing, but such an option wasn’t on offer, so they made do with what they had.
Okay, but how many other journalists do you think have found themselves, as they’ve gotten older, running out energy and ideas and then cutting corners to meet deadlines and contracts? I suspect it’s not all that rare.
But it’s pretty boring for others to track down and document. I tried reading The New Republic article before you brought it up, but it’s not a page-turner.
And it’s often not in the interest of the less famous person whose work is borrowed to expose the borrower — it’s often more beneficial to privately develop a relationship of mutual back-scratching.
The borrower and borrowee are generally on the same side intellectually, so the less famous person may decide not to raise a stink. For example, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote up the concept of natural selection and mailed it to Charles Darwin in 1858. Wallace was a good sport about Darwin then claiming priority for the idea based upon some private correspondence. In fact, Wallace made some much-needed money years later by naming one of his books “Darwinism,” which helped cement Darwin’s claim to fame over, say, rather than Darwin-Wallaceism.
Writers who aren’t enthusiastic about Israel, however, will tend to find their sins hunted down and exposed. Remember the huge investment “Commentary” put in during the 1990s into exposing how Edward Said had exaggerated when he claimed his father’s house in Jerusalem had been stolen by the Israelis? After endless research it turned out that the house had been stolen from … Said’s aunt! (Or maybe uncle.) Here’s the long Commentary article from 1999:
http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/glosses/weinerAttackOnSaid.html
These kind of examples have a “to encourage the others” effect. Feel guilty about anything? Well, then, don’t mess with Israel!
Steve:
I think the Israel thing is pretty obscure in this case. I read all of Ketcham’s article and didn’t catch anything about Israel or Palestine. It seemed to me more like the usual case of a lazy writer with good connections. I too suspect it’s not all that rare. But I’m sure I have a biased view of this sort of thing because, now that I’m known as someone who’s irritated by plagiarism, people send me these sort of links. Just like people keep pointing me to bad graphs, and to silly tabloid-science things.
There are a lot of resources available on the pro-Israel center-left for hit pieces on the anti-Israel left. That doesn’t mean that the people who get hit aren’t guilty of something, just that there’s a selection bias in terms of who gets a giant article in The New Republic published about their failings.
You might think that based on it being published at the New Republic, but the author basically sounds like a fellow traveller whose wife was among the plagiarized.
Andrew:
But isn’t the Harper’s example in this story a case where editors & the system actually worked quite well? The plagiarism was detected _pre-publication_, the author was confronted, the piece was aborted & the author never ever worked for Harper’s again.
Sounds like a great example of the system working.
I agree with most of this but just to illustrate the other extreme I’ve seen journal articles that overdo the citation bit. Literally citation soup.
Every sentence has three number superscripts. It makes for annoying, disjointed reading sometimes.
I’ll agree and disagree with you (98% agree). Yes, it is annoying, and sometimes it is not necessary to list all the citations. For example, when someone is giving a ‘for example’ list two is enough (you aren’t claiming the list is exhaustive), it is not necessary to list 20 just to show you can Google 20 articles (and it looks better if you can choose 2 or 3 that really represent the list). I’ve seen papers even list unpublished talks that aren’t in anyway special among long lists as if those will be easy for readers to find (maybe they are trying to show they can go beyond Google!).
But, I would rather have citations listed and the scientific papers being disjointed rather than the author thinking they are writing something that could be submitted to a creative writing competition. So yes, avoid citation soup, but in some outlets scientists seem encouraged the other extreme.
Note to self: new form of legal trolling for biz idea. Sue websites and everyday people for scraping the web to insert clipart, wingdings (are those still around?), obscure fonts, and yet unheard of names for hex color #ff270b…..or something.
I’ll make millions…..mwahaha…..
Interesting. About a month ago I was reading “Walking on Lava” here – http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/ – and thought that the words seemed really familiar. Specifically, I thought I’d read them in a Hedges post on Truthout*. Now I’m going to have to check to see if I really did or if I was imagining it.
(*Not a Hedges fan but have sometimes found him worth reading. I may revise that position.)
I was reading it and thought it is a bit heavy handed to say ‘As the great…’ but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have footnotes or a link to a supplemental version that includes citations, or a terminal attribution statement, etc.
A collage doesn’t need to ‘cite sources’ because _as a collage_ the genre is all about pastiche. If he wanted to write a piece completely of unchanged and unattributed quotes, he somehow would need to situate it in that genre and then, religiously, avoid changing the quotes, or changing them according to some set of rules in a potentially uniform way. However, this is not common in the genre of reporting (or, in fact, any common literary genre today) and would require some explanation, if nothing else at the level of the publication.
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