Ian Haysom Global TV News Director Saturday, October 04, 2008
When it comes to plagiarism, it's been the best of weeks, the worst of weeks, a time of wisdom, a time of foolishness.
Some have protested too much. A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, right?
Then again, it's like déjà vu all over again.
You see how easy it is to beg, steal and borrow when you're writing on deadline? I'm sure Dickens, Shake-speare and Yogi Berra
wouldn't mind too much that I just borrowed from them, but it shows the critical importance of words.
No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world (well, that's what Robin Williams said in Dead Poets' Society).
This week's kerfuffle over how Stephen Harper's speechwriter cut and pasted a speech on Iraq from former Australian Prime Minister John Howard is stunning.
Not for the fact that it was pure plagiarism (passing off someone's words or ideas as your own) but because Howard, the world's biggest dullard, said something someone thought worth repeating. We subsequently bored two nations to death.
When you come to think of it, the Canadian speechwriter, who resigned this week, almost certainly borrowed from an Australian speechwriter. Has anyone figured out whether the Australian speechwriter borrowed from, say, a speechwriter for the King of Morocco?
(An aside. Some of the most famous speeches in recent history weren't the work of the person who delivered them. JFK's famous "Ask not what your country can do" inaugural address was written, at least in part, by Theodore Sorensen, the president's speechwriter. I find that, somehow, very sad. Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address himself and was at first vilified for its simplicity.)
Plagiarism is today's plague. Those words and ideas bounce around the Internet, just waiting to be Googled and cut and pasted into a term paper or a quarterly report. Or even a newspaper column.
Plagiarism is driving universities and colleges crazy. Profs will give their students an instant failing grade if they find they've stolen, say, from Einstein or Dostoevsky without attribution. There are now computer programs that will watch for stolen paragraphs or lifted passages.
The web might be a goldmine for researchers and students and the rest of us. But it's often difficult to know what's already been stolen or manipulated. And that's before we start messing with it.
As for media, it's a minefield. We've been stealing good ideas from one another for years without actually admitting it. A newspaper may see a good series in a newspaper in another part of the world -- or country -- and do it in their own.
I actually receive a weekly newsletter that tells me about superb investigative series that worked on other TV stations around the world, all offered up as ripe for the picking. Is that plagiarism? Perhaps not. Just lazy.
There's also the rip-and-read approach to morning radio reporting. Some radio stations subscribe to news services or have their own reporters. Others -- the rock-jock stations -- just pick up the morning paper, and read out the local news without crediting anyone.
Many years ago, when the Internet was in its infancy, I wrote a big entertainment feature on how lots of people online were debating the meaning of Don McLean's American Pie. Who was the jester who sang for the king and queen? It made for a fascinating feature, and I attributed as carefully as I could. The feature was picked up by just about every newspaper in our chain, and given good play.
A few weeks later I was in London, and there in a major Fleet Street newspaper was my feature. With another reporter's name atop. Some of the words had been changed, but about 90 per cent of the feature had been ripped off.
I thought about complaining, but decided I'd let it go. Fleet Street, when I worked there, was a minefield of plagiarism before the age of cut and paste. A paper's own reporters' bylines routinely went atop words written by stringers and news services.
Some columnists in this country famously have copied entire passages or, indeed, complete columns or film from others, hoping not to get caught out. Or because, on deadline, they panicked. Resignations or firings have immediately followed.
A year or so ago my wife was reading one of my columns and said, "Haven't I read this somewhere before?" I froze. I thought for a brief moment I'd inadvertently scalped someone else's idea. Then I realized I'd written on the same subject many years earlier. And related the same anecdote. I was plagiarizing myself. How pathetic is that?
I have a good memory. It's just short. I think Yogi Berra said that. If not, he should have. I know I didn't.
Ian Haysom is news director of Global News in British Columbia. He divides his week between Central Saanich and Vancouver.
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