Marcus Brauchli, Post executive editor, issued an appropriate public apology and a direct one to the Republic and its staff. From the moment he learned of the plagiarism on Monday, March 14, via an e-mail from the Republic that also came to me as ombudsman, he took it seriously, investigated and acted quickly to discipline Horwitz. As Brauchli put it more colloquially in an interview: “Sari screwed up. She knows she screwed up.”
I’m a hard-liner on plagiarism. I view it as theft. I came up in journalism working at smaller publications that competed with bigger papers — regional and national dailies with abundantly more resources and reporters. We worked doubly hard and frequently scooped our competition.
Reporters at those larger publications regularly “stole” from us, sometimes arrogantly so. In the early years it made me angry, but pretty soon it happened so often, I viewed it with a mix of anger and triumph. Our stories were driving the news and the local debate, forcing our bigger competitors to follow, imitate and occasionally credit us.
But not once did any reporter ever cut and paste whole sentences and paragraphs from something I or my colleagues wrote, as Horwitz did. It’s as audacious as it is lazy. And it is foolish in an age when most journalism is obtainable in seconds with a few mouse clicks.
So my sympathies are with the Arizona Republic and Dennis Wagner, the reporter who did the initial work on the story that was most plagiarized. He made the phone calls, did the legwork and picked out the most compelling parts of the court documents released about Loughner. “It’s not so unusual that you see your stuff paraphrased,” Wagner said. “But then I got the feeling as I read it that it was almost identical, in structure and in wording. I was floored.”
Wagner and his editor, Kristen DelGuzzi, did due diligence, looking at other Horwitz stories, but found no other instances of plagiarism. The Post did, too, finding no other examples in Horwitz’s work on the Arizona shootings or in a range of her other work over a decade. A Post review of more of her work is still ongoing.
But the damage is done, and it is lingering. It puts another chink in the already thin armor of journalism. Said Wagner: “It’s bad because it undermines the credibility not just of The Washington Post but of journalists in general. People think we take shortcuts and cheat, and it’s hurtful to all of us.”
Loading...
Comments