Journalist Fareed Zakaria is seated during Harvard
University commencement exercises before being awarded an honorary
Doctor of Laws from the University, in Cambridge, Mass.,
Thomas
Jefferson wasn’t trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes when he
directly borrowed John Locke’s ideas and language to declare the
principle of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But, by
definition, we could call what he did plagiarism.
The major moral lesson to be taken from the Fareed Zakaria scandal is not what the media focused on this past week. Yes, he lifted material concerning the long, mostly unknown history of gun control, and he did so transparently. Even if he hadn’t been obliged to come up with an article for Time on a short deadline, he would still have taken more or less the same steps, and for a reason that, on the surface, makes perfect sense: The history he needed to tap into was too involved for someone trained as a journalist to investigate in depth.
Michael Barthel’s probing piece in Salon about transparency and credibility in the Internet age aims at the heart of the problem. But for professional historians, there’s more to it than the cut-and-paste freedom that the Web invites. Plagiarism is both a broader and touchier issue than most people imagine it to be – outright “copying.” It is ultimately a question of originality.
Frankly, we in the history business wish we could take out a restraining order on the big-budget popularizers of history (many of them trained in journalism) who pontificate with great flair and happily take credit over the airwaves for possessing great insight into the past. Journalists are good at journalism – we wouldn’t suggest sending off historians to be foreign correspondents. But journalists aren’t equipped to make sense of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Let this be, then, the tale of two highly visible Harvard Ph.D.’s who have been caught red-handed committing plagiarism. Both Fareed Zakaria and Doris Kearns Goodwin were awarded degrees in government from Harvard, 25 years apart. Goodwin, the elder, is a serial plagiarizer who has been welcomed back with open arms by the TV punditocracy. She directly and egregiously lifted quotes from others’ works on multiple occasions – a Pulitzer Prize–winning book contained passages plagiarized from three different writers! – and she quietly paid off one aggrieved author.
The major moral lesson to be taken from the Fareed Zakaria scandal is not what the media focused on this past week. Yes, he lifted material concerning the long, mostly unknown history of gun control, and he did so transparently. Even if he hadn’t been obliged to come up with an article for Time on a short deadline, he would still have taken more or less the same steps, and for a reason that, on the surface, makes perfect sense: The history he needed to tap into was too involved for someone trained as a journalist to investigate in depth.
Michael Barthel’s probing piece in Salon about transparency and credibility in the Internet age aims at the heart of the problem. But for professional historians, there’s more to it than the cut-and-paste freedom that the Web invites. Plagiarism is both a broader and touchier issue than most people imagine it to be – outright “copying.” It is ultimately a question of originality.
Frankly, we in the history business wish we could take out a restraining order on the big-budget popularizers of history (many of them trained in journalism) who pontificate with great flair and happily take credit over the airwaves for possessing great insight into the past. Journalists are good at journalism – we wouldn’t suggest sending off historians to be foreign correspondents. But journalists aren’t equipped to make sense of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Let this be, then, the tale of two highly visible Harvard Ph.D.’s who have been caught red-handed committing plagiarism. Both Fareed Zakaria and Doris Kearns Goodwin were awarded degrees in government from Harvard, 25 years apart. Goodwin, the elder, is a serial plagiarizer who has been welcomed back with open arms by the TV punditocracy. She directly and egregiously lifted quotes from others’ works on multiple occasions – a Pulitzer Prize–winning book contained passages plagiarized from three different writers! – and she quietly paid off one aggrieved author.