Letters

THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT

Trudy Lieberman's attack on plagiarism (cjr, July/August) was well-intended, but her priorities are misguided. Our profession's cardinal sin is not plagiarism, as she asserts; it's misinforming the public. Plagiarism is a serious offense, but it's a private matter within our profession. The bottom line should be the insight we can bring to readers -- not who gets the credit.

Very often journalists under tight deadlines and space restrictions must choose between short-changing their readers or short-changing fellow journalists. A reporter who scrupulously attributed every fact, quote, or turn of phrase would run the risk of missing her deadline, exhausting her available space, or turning off her audience with her cluttered prose. In such cases, chastising a journalist for plagiarism is like criticizing a policeman for running a red light in pursuit of a mass murderer.

Incidentally, I write as a journalist whose work has often been plagiarized. In one case an author re-worked a magazine article of mine, without attribution, into a chapter in his book. In another case an author cobbled together an entire book largely from articles I had written, again without attribution.

Of course such behavior disappoints me. But I became a journalist to help foster the spread of knowledge -- not for personal fame or fortune. I would rather see journalists make use of my research -- even without giving me credit -- than see readers deprived of available information.

Dan Rottenberg
Philadelphia, Pa.

Congratulations on a long-overdue look at journalism's dirty little secret. Plagiarism is far more pervasive than the general public realizes, and it threatens to lower our credibility to the level of lawyers.

In the case of Bob Wisehart, former columnist for The Sacramento Bee, it should also be noted that after his first incident of plagiarism, his colleague Pete Dexter (now a book author) was quick to come to his defense, writing in a column that Wisehart was undergoing personal problems at the time. I left Sacramento several years ago, and have always wondered how Dexter rationalized the second offense.

Plagiarism is theft, and if you worked for a major retailer and stole even a pack of chewing gum, you would be fired immediately. The business world learned this lesson long ago: they know that if you steal once and get away with it, you will steal again. Why is this so hard for newspapers to accept?

Carissa Hazelett
Scottsdale, Ariz.

A footnote to your good piece on plagiarism and assorted re-uses of words:

In the 1950s, I was writing editorials for The Evening Gazette in Worcester, Massachusetts. While visiting friends in New Jersey, I picked up a daily paper (which is no longer in business) and idly started reading its editorial on John Foster Dulles. About Word Eight, I realized I was reading something I had written for Worcester a few days earlier. There it was, in all its glory, uncredited, all its words, all its sentiments, even the same head, as I recall.

I subscribed to the paper. In a month, I found twenty editorials that my colleagues in Worcester or I had written. Sometimes we led the NewJersey page; sometimes we just filled out the editorial columns. Understandably, most of the material dealt with national or international issues. But there were a few local editorials, with Massachusetts changed to New Jersey, and even one with Worcester changed to the New Jersey city. Other than that, and an occasional rewritten head, no change.

Our editorial staff wondered whether one of those subterranean "editorial services" might have picked up our stuff and sold it, but the turnaround time seemed too short. Finally, I wrote a letter to the New Jersey editor, asking what on earth was going on and why. I got no answer, but the borrowing stopped abruptly.

I could imagine some overworked editorial page wretch with a big pair of shears clipping us -- and other papers? -- to fill the yawning void. Maybe we just had a Secret Admirer. Or, a worse thought: maybe those borrowed editorials helped put them out of business.

Robert C. Achorn
Sutton, Mass.

HEY, GOOD LOOKIN'

When I married Newton Minow forty-six years ago, I hoped one day his picture would appear in the pages of the Columbia Journalism Review. At long last he made it in the July/August issue on page 44. But somehow it does not look like him. Could you please check your photo library and tell me who that good-looking guy is on page 44?

Josephine B. Minow
Chicago, Ill.

The editors reply: The photo was apparently mismarked by the agency that supplied it to cjr. Regrettably, the identity of the hunk remains unknown.

THE FUN WENT ON

I am glad that "About Books" in the July/August issue of cjr featured Carol Polsgrove's terrific book about Esquire in the sixties, It Wasn't Pretty,Folks, But Didn't We Have Fun? Robert Smith's review got it right, too, except for a line after the anecdote about how Harold Hayes won his argument with me over Esquire's fee for my articles. Smith says, "Morgan never wrote for the magazine again." But that is not so. Posgrove merely reported that I did not write again
 for Hayes.

A while after Hayes left (1971), I wrote again for Esquire, under editors Betsy Carter and Phil Moffitt. I contributed the profile of Audie Murphy for Esquire's fiftieth anniversary issue (1983); "The Latinization of America"(1985); an autobiographical profile on turning sixty (1986); and an article about Vietnam journalism, "Reporters of the Lost War"(1987).

I must add that among those writers interviewed for the last-named piece (it really has been my last for Esquire, for the time being), Michael Herr, author of Dispatches, was the best of all, and, of course, one of Harold Hayes's discoveries.

Thomas B. Morgan
New York, N.Y.

THE NEW JOURNALISM

Your Dart to the Gloucester County Times [for assigning and running at the publisher's behest a page-one story on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the John Wanamaker department store in the area] made it appear a knee-jerk reaction from the top down. It was not.

Community journalism, among other things, should reflect the economic health of the areas it serves, which is exactly the purpose of this particular story. The story reflected the commitment that an established retailer had made to the community despite an uncertain economic climate. Your Dart flew exactly one week after the Wanamaker chain announced it is closing its doors permanently, with the potential loss of some 160 local jobs.

Bill Long
|Editor
Gloucester County Times
Woodbury, N.J.

OF MICE OR MEN

Stuart Schear's review of our anthology, The New Science Journalists (Books, cjr, July/August), raises important questions about the nature and scope of science journalism, but some of his criticism of the field does not apply to our book. He also makes misleading comments about us.

Schear claims we had an "aversion to the nitty-gritty of public health" and focused too much on the animal or natural rather than the human world. Yet three of our eighteen selections covered policy conflicts in health and medicine. Three pieces also covered animal behavior and ecology, while the others stressed the human implications of research in many different fields.

Schear accuses us of careless use of writers' comments, but his one example of this is itself careless. He criticizes our reference to a quote from the Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Jon Franklin: "Science has become capable of latching onto the latest fad, like AIDS or global warming," and suggests that "the reader can only assume that they [editors] believe that some of the attention paid to AIDS has been driven by a social fad." This is a selectively misleading comment on our passage that examined the misuse of human tragedy by such institutions as large drug companies.

Schear's review claims only one kind of writing "truly deserves the mantle" of new science journalism, that which sorts "through the political, economic, institutional, and social agendas influencing science and science policy." We disagree. Our book highlights not only this new investigative science writing, but also articles that glean critical new trends from disparate studies, and those that dramatize science with a novelistic intensity. We leave it to the reader to decide which editorial policy is more, to use Schear's term, "myopic."

Ted Anton
Rick McCourt
Chicago, Ill.

ENVIRONMENTAL REVISIONISM

While I found much of Kevin Carmody's story on the backlash in environmental reporting commendable ("It's a Jungle Out There," cjr, May/June), I'd disagree with his tracing of the current revisionist reporting to "a few disparate voices, including a number of serious environmental journalists, asking tough questions . . . ."

I found it much more a case of the ideologically driven conservative media once again proving themselves capable of mainstreaming their spin on a given story. Admittedly, by Earth Day 1990, with 76 percent of the public calling themselves environmentalists (according to a Gallup poll), there was a strong tendency among the major media to cover the environment the way they might cover a patriotic parade on the Fourth of July.

However, 1990 was also the year Soviet communism folded its tent and, rather than celebrate the outbreak of democracy in eastern Europe, much of the Republican right and its captive media began a frantic search for new enemies. Richard Darman, President Bush's director of OMB, told a Harvard audience that environmentalism was the "green mask" under which "competing ideologies will continue their global struggle."

While the green menace hasn't lived up to the red menace as a unifying principle for the right, it has at least found a place in the pantheon of governmental and social evils regularly excoriated by conservative media juggernauts ranging from Rush Limbaugh and his radio clones to the editorial page writers at The Wall Street Journal.

Perhaps in the wake of Carmody's well-researched story cjr readers will be inspired to take a closer look at some of their "journalistic" sources before repeating dramatic anecdotes of environmental/regulatory abuse that often times turn out to be less than they appear.

David Helvarg
Sausalito, Calif.
Helvarg is the author of the recently published book The War Against the Greens.

In the recent debate in your Letters section between Kevin Carmody, author of "It's a Jungle Out There," and Susan Allen of the Adirondack Park Agency Reporter, Carmody expressed an opinion that caught my attention, to wit, "Earth Firsters do carry out acts of civil disobedience. That might make them pests, but I'm not sure that using their own bodies to block access to a road or a pond qualifies as violence." As an active pro-lifer, I wish Carmody could be one of those journalists who cover pro-life activism, inasmuch as the same sorts of acts of civil disobedience by pro-lifers are consistently referred to as "pro-life violence" in media reports and editorials by almost all but pro-life media publications.

Larry Davis
Marietta, Ga.

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE HEARTLAND

Apropos the victims of the Oklahoma disaster (Soundbite, cjr, July/August): Did anyone ask the question, What was it like there all along?

That elusive news peg would have brought out the fact that a few days after that bombing that took hundreds of lives, including more than a dozen children, the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse issued the results of a two-and-a-half-year study. As reported by the Chicago Reader, this study showed that abuse and neglect in the home was the main cause of death among American children under the age of four, claiming 2,000 lives and 18,000 disabling injuries a year.

By comparison, the second leading cause of death, car accidents, killed only half as many children. Yes, the home is the most dangerous place for these youngsters to be.

Even in the heartland? Well, let's take forcible rape, for instance. New York's 1993 rate of such crimes was 27.5 per 100,000 women. Oklahoma? 49.3 per 100,000 women.

Oklahoma City? Even worse! 73.9 per 100,000, almost twice that of Los Angeles, and nearly three times the rate of New York City and Washington, D.C. The highest rape rate of all cities is Rapid City, South Dakota.

Can't get much more heartland than that! Too bad the press doesn't get out there more. There is the real story of America.

D.B. Zoellner
Evanston, Ill.

CORRECTION

CJR's May/June Technology section provided inaccurate instructions for subscribing to GUILDNET-L, an electronic mailing list for the discussion of working conditions in the media in the U.S. and Canada. The correct procedure is to address majordomo@acs.ryerson.ca with the message subscribe guildnet-l (your e-mail address).

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