It's been a few months since we've had ourselves a good-old plagiarism incident to get riled up about. But thanks to Rolling Stone, our sleepy summer Friday just got a bit more scandalous!
The magazine is taking some heat today for lifting quotes in Matt Taibbi's hit piece on Minnesota's 2012 Tea Party hopeful Michele Bachmann.
In the story, posted online Wednesday, Taibbi borrows heavily from a 2006 profile of Bachmann by G.R. Anderson, a former Minneapolis City Pages reporter who now teaches journalism at the University of Minnesota. The thin sourcing, as Abe Sauer argues over at The Awl, is part of a "parade of uncredited use of material" from local blogs and reporters who "have dogged Bachmann for years now."
But the larger issue for journalism's ethical watchdogs concerns the several unattributed quotes Sauer spotted in Taibbi's piece, which Rolling Stone executive editor Eric Bates explained away by saying he'd cut out the attributions due to "space concerns" and that he would "get some links included in the story online."
At least one plagiarism "expert" doesn't buy Bates' logic.
"Attribution is the last thing an editor should cut!!!!" Jack Shafer, who is known to grill copy-stealers in his media column for Slate (and who used to edit two alt-weeklies similar to City Pages), told The Cutline via email. "How big was the art hole on that piece? Huge, I'll bet."
Shafer added: "If an editor deletes attribution, can the writer be called a plagiarist? I don't think so. Is that what happened? If Taibbi approved the deletions, it's another question."
We emailed Taibbi, who is no stranger to press controversies, with a request for comment and will update this if we hear back.
UPDATE 4 p.m. "I did in fact refer to the City Pages piece in the draft I submitted," Taibbi told The Cutline. "I did not see that those attributions had been removed. I grew up in alternative newspapers and have been in the position the City Pages reporter is in, so I'm sympathetic. They did good work in that piece and deserve to be credited. But you should know also that this isn't plagiarism--it's not even an allegation of plagiarism. It's an attribution issue."
In the meantime, Anderson is giving Rolling Stone the benefit of the doubt, although he didn't let them off the hook entirely.
"I would not consider what the Rolling Stone [piece] contained in it to be plagiarism," Anderson told City Pages. "What I will say, as a graduate of the Columbia J-School, and an adjunct at the University of Minnesota J-School, I do know that if a student handed in a story with that particular lack of sourcing, not only would I give it an 'F,' I would probably put that student on academic fraud."
You can check out a side-by-side comparison of the two Bachmann profiles over at The Awl.
UPDATE 8 p.m. A representative of Rolling Stone took issue with the characterization of the dispute as involving "plagiarism" in this post's original headline, noting that the author of the City Pages Bachmann profile didn't use the term, so the headline has since been modified.
from
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thecutline/20110624/ts_yblog_thecutline/rolling-stone-caught-in-potential-plagiarism-flap-over-michele-bachmann-profile