Jill Abramson was the top editor at the most important newspaper in the world. Yet, she acts like the most fundamental part of reported journalism is a foreign concept.
Since her book Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts published last week, Abramson’s seen a slew of examples of passages in her book that word-for-word repeat the work of other writers without clear attribution.
She has refused to concede that any of the work was plagiarized — rather, she has only allowed that she made “mistakes” that need to be “corrected.”
“All I can tell you is I certainly didn’t plagiarize in my book and there are 70 pages of footnotes showing where I got the information,” she said on Fox News last week, referring to the endnotes of her book, which she did several times more in subsequent interviews.
She said Sunday on CNN, “This was a case in which doing 70 pages of something that are called trailing footnotes — there are a few that dropped out and I feel terrible about that.”
The footnote excuse might carry substance if Abramson hadn’t crammed them in the back of her book with the grace of a drunk driver who has to pee. Or like she didn’t expect anyone to look at them, which would imply that she’s lying about her attempts to credit others.
There are no cross references within the book to show precisely what sentences, statements, or facts Abramson attributes to the work of others. Instead, if readers see something in the book and want to know the source material, they would have to go through Abramson’s “70 pages of footnotes” to find the page number and basically guess that it’s the appropriate citation. CNN reported on one such endnote citation last week. The endnote said, “327 One of the suits against BuzzFeed: Josh Gerstein, ‘Russian Bank Owners Sue BuzzFeed over Trump Dossier Publication,’ Politico, May 26, 2017, https://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2017/05/26/trump-dossier-russian-bank-owners-sue-buzzfeed-238876.” The “327” is the page number in the book with which the citation corresponds, but nowhere on that page is anything to direct readers to that specific endnote.
Abramson’s other excuse is even more embarrassing.
“In narrative book writing, it isn’t exactly the same as journalism,” Abramson said Sunday on CNN.
“Look, I was trying to write a seamless narrative, and to keep breaking it up with ‘according to’ qualifiers would have been extremely clunky,” she told Vox last week.
First of all, if “seamless” prose is suddenly a concern, then I want to know why Charles Blow kept his job as a columnist on Abramson’s watch. But that aside, only a bad writer would blame problems with her work on an inability to structure sentences that were both pleasant and ethically adequate. Re-working words until they’re right is literally the job of a journalist, and of an editor.
I have no strong opinion on Abramson’s book, another text about the tumult of the news business is a certain cure for insomnia. But her excuses about the plagiarism make her look like a liar. Or worse, a bad writer.
