One reporter's notebook
A culture of plagiarism
When I was a reporter working for the Deseret News, I'd be driving my Grand Am - or was it a VW bug? I forget - around town listening to the radio. A story would come on about the City Council meeting in Orem or the last controversy at the Utah County Commission or some crime in town. I'd feel a pinch of excitement that the radio was using my story. Once, even the great Dick Nourse at KSL read a sad piece about a young child, and he used my exact words. Never mind that I didn't work for KSL or any broadcast station.
In point of fact, they were using my words, literally. After my story appeared in the Deseret News, unless the News specifically copyrighted a story, the good folks at the Associated Press could rewrite it without any reference to the News or to me, the story's writer. The AP, in turn, sent my rewritten story across the wires to various news agencies throughout the state or country. radio or television picked up the wire story - still do -- and used it in their drive-time reports. This arrangement seems to serve a public good in that it allows for a broader community to get information about its community. It also has the effect of saving the radio stations money.
It is true that such coverage excited me at the time - I influenced the conversation of our community - but as the years have gone by, I have found that something really stinks about this arrangement.
In most any other circumstance, such an arrangement would be called plagiarism. I made no extra money when KSL radio or from KCPX or from whomever when they ran my stuff. Still, the radio stations didn't even tell their listeners about the work I did. Yet they profited, often handsomely. Anyone know how much most anchors in major markets make?
In the media business, of course, writers at radio stations or at TV stations using wire copy are acting within a contractual arrangement within media. They didn't owe me anything in a legal - and probably moral sense.
Not that I'm some innocent victim here. As an editor at a small weekly, I'd sometimes take - verbatim - press releases from the local hospital and run them in my newspaper. Never thought twice about its ethical implications. And I'm sure the hospital never had any problems with the arrangement, even though we never paid or even credited them for the information. In fact, such publication was the intent of the press release in the first place.
Never mind that in other circumstances - such as in college - to pass someone else's work off as my own would have been the worst sort of plagiarism. In a world of media, the relationships are different, and I worry about the side effects this culture causes.
Think how far this culture goes. Even when late night comedians makes a joke about some news event, they seem to borrow from wire services and newspapers profusely. I rarely hear where they get the idea for the joke. It is surely within fair use and not plagiarism in any legal sense of which I know, but, nevertheless, these comedians profit handsomely at their trade. Doesn't that lack of credit to the poor, young reporters covering some police blotter in western Indiana seem wrong somehow?
When I see local papers, owned by out-of-state corporations, fill their news hole with wire copy rather than hire reporters to write local stories, it saves these corporations considerable money. And this use of excessive wire copy can do a grave disservice to a community. The wire copy, even if well-written and reported, is available in other forms elsewhere. The newspaper's voice is not original, therefore. But worse still, the wire stories often come from places outside of or of little interest to the community. How does such a newspaper act as a watchdog on official corruption or aid the community dialog. Instead, these corporations just sit back, sell advertisements, write a few perfunctory local stories and let others do the rest of the work though wire service copy. Something about that just seems wrong, even if it is part of the contract.
And I can't help wondering whether this set of relationships leads to confusion among my students at BYU-Idaho. They are smart consumers of media and probably get, even if only by intuition, this cross-pollination among media.
This cross-pollination gives an example of how to write papers, how to produce stories and how to develop student newspapers. Indeed, is it any wonder that when I judge high school papers, I regularly see photos downloaded from the Internet without any sense that there might be a problem? When I try to carefully illustrate the pitfalls of plagiarism to my students in the classroom, some of my students - who sign honor codes here -- seem shocked that they might have been guilty of plagiarism. Those I have been willing to send to the dean seem honestly confused. It hadn't even occurred to them that such uses might be wrong. I guess I shouldn't be surprised given media's general culture. They see such borrowing without credit everyday.
John Burns at The New York Times wasn't talking about the gratuitous use of wire services or about press releases when he famously wrote that “there is corruption in our business,” but I worry that this culture of plagiarism, if you will, isn't, in fact, so widespread that we don't, as media professionals, recognize that the culture has corrupted us - even if it was done by contract.
Worse still, I worry this culture is influencing our communities - and my dear students -- as well.
Of course, my views should not be construed to represent anything other than my own views. They are NOT necessarily the views of my department, my university or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the sponsoring institution of my university.