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Journalistic Shoplifting
 Clark Hoyt - New York Times
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March 07, 2010
Zachery Kouwe, a Times business reporter for a little over a year, resigned last month after he was accused of plagiarizing from The Wall Street Journal. An internal review of his work turned up more articles — he said he was shown four — containing copy clearly lifted from other news sources.
Plagiarism is a mortal journalistic sin, and Kouwe’s departure was inevitable from the moment that Robert Thomson, the managing editor of The Journal, sent Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, six examples of language taken verbatim, or nearly so, from a Journal article about continuing legal fallout from Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
The Times handled the matter with dispatch. After a weekend of tedious checking by two researchers, the paper ran an editors’ note saying that Kouwe appeared to have “improperly appropriated wording and passages published by other news organizations.” It acknowledged the theft from The Journal, mentioned Reuters as another victim and said an investigation was continuing. The note said the researchers found no indication that any article was inaccurate.
Though Kouwe was gone the next day, questions remain: How did his serial plagiarism happen and go undetected for so long? Why were warning signs overlooked? Was there anything at fault in the culture of DealBook, the hyper-competitive news blog on which Kouwe worked? And, now that the investigation is complete, what about a full accounting to readers?
The day he resigned, Kouwe told John Koblin of The New York Observer that he did not knowingly plagiarize and couldn’t explain what happened. “I was as surprised as anyone that this was occurring,” he said, adding that, when shown the examples, he said to himself: “Man, what an idiot. What was I thinking?”
Kouwe told Koblin that the plagiarism happened with minor news reported elsewhere that needed to be matched on DealBook. He said he would copy stories from wires, paste them into a file in the editing system, verify the information and then put the material in his own words. At least, he said, that is what he intended to do. When I asked him how he could fail to notice that he was copying someone else’s work, he added further explanation: He said the raw material in the computer files in which he assembled his stories included not only reports from other sources but also context and background from previous articles that he had written himself. When putting it all together, he said, he must have thought the words he copied were his own, earlier ones. “It was just my carelessness in trying to get it up quickly,” he said.
The explanation was similar to one offered only days earlier by Gerald Posner, a reporter for The Daily Beast, who was caught by Jack Shafer of Slate cribbing sentences from The Miami Herald. Posner, who resigned after even more plagiarism was found, also said that he did not do it intentionally. He said he had poured all his research — interviews, public documents, published articles — into a master electronic file and then boiled it into an article under tight Web deadlines, a process that led to disaster.
Everyone I talked with at The Times agreed that the practices described by Kouwe and Posner were unacceptable. “If you are writing your own story, you shouldn’t be downloading this stuff,” said Jack Lynch, the news editor of DealBook. “That’s asking for trouble.” Amen.
Philip Corbett, the standards editor, said most of what Kouwe lifted, which also involved Bloomberg News and The Financial Times, was “pretty banal stuff,” often background material. That may explain why it went undetected. As Larry Ingrassia, the business editor, said, it was more like packs of gum shoplifted than big-screen televisions stolen.
Could Times editors have seen trouble coming? Two incidents from last year might have served as warnings:
In January, Dealbreaker, a competing Web site, scored a scoop by posting an internal Citigroup memo about a rumored joint venture. The same memo soon went up on DealBook, complete with two minor alterations that Dealbreaker had inserted as a trap to catch competitors ripping off material without credit. Dealbreaker’s editor, Bess Levin, posted a gotcha. I called and asked her what happened next. She said got a call from Andrew Ross Sorkin, the editor of DealBook, who explained that Kouwe had verified the memo with Citigroup and was going to get his own copy. Rather than wait, Kouwe grabbed it from her site, she said Sorkin told her. Sorkin immediately ordered an editors’ note inserted in the DealBook item that gave credit and explained what happened.
Sorkin said Kouwe had told him “it was an honest mistake. I told him that it was unacceptable, but I had no reason to believe it represented a larger problem.”
In August, The Journal posted a report that investors in Cerberus Capital Management were seeking to withdraw $5.5 billion, 70 percent of its assets. Roughly an hour and a half later, DealBook posted a similar report, by Kouwe, citing the same $5.5 billion. When The Journal complained, the DealBook article was updated to give credit for the scoop.
Kouwe told me he had been doing his own reporting work on the story at the same time that The Journal had been. But the $5.5 billion number in The Journal was a mistake, based on its own erroneous calculation. A spokesman for Cerberus told me that the company pointed the mistake out to the paper, which ran a correction. The spokesman confirmed that Kouwe had also been talking to the company but could not recall if the mistake was pointed out to The Times, which has not corrected it. Kouwe told me he did his own calculation.
Ingrassia, who did not know about either incident at the time, said, “I think everybody looks back and says, yeah, there were warning signs.” He said he would instruct his staff to tell him about every complaint when proper credit was not given.
Many at The Times with whom I spoke seem to regard Kouwe’s plagiarism as an isolated case involving a problematic reporter. But Ingrassia said he is initiating conversations to see if there are things that should be done differently in DealBook and the rest of his department. At a time when cut-and-paste technology enables plagiarism, when news and information on the Web are treated as commodities, these are conversations worth having throughout the Times building.
As for DealBook itself, it may need added oversight. Sorkin, who founded it and turned it into a highly successful franchise, wears many hats: editor, reporter, columnist and book author. His fast-moving blog contains original reporting and aggregates news from other sources in a complex stew. Much of the copy gets read only once by an editor, usually Lynch or another news editor.
Finally, The Times owes readers a full accounting. I asked Corbett for the examples of Kouwe’s plagiarism and suggested that editors’ notes be appended to those articles on the Web site and in The Times’s electronic archives. Corbett would not provide the examples and said the paper was not inclined to flag them, partly because there were some clear-cut cases and others that were less clear. “Where do you draw the line?” he asked.
I’d draw it at those he regards as clear. To do otherwise is to leave a corrupted record within the archives of The Times. It is not the way to close the case. |
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