Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson refused to concede Sunday that several passages in her new book were plagiarized, instead saying she made “errors” in the way sources were credited.
“I would never purposely take credit for the work of another journalist or writer,” Abramson told CNN’s “Reliable Sources” during an interview.
Instead, Abramson said the cribbed paragraphs were the result of “doing 70 pages” of trailing footnotes that she asserted did cite the sources for the entries in question.
But, she admitted, “there are a few that dropped out, and I feel terrible about that.”
[Related: Jill Abramson: ‘I certainly didn’t plagiarize in my book’]
Abramson has come under fire after reporters discovered several paragraphs from her new book, Merchants of Truth, were lifted from other news sources nearly word-for-word.
“Reliable Sources” host Brian Stelter pressed Abramson on her refusal to admit plagiarism, noting the examples raised met both the New York Times’ and Harvard University’s definitions of plagiarism. Abramson is a senior lecturer at Harvard.
“It doesn’t matter if I put a footnote 300 pages later,” he told Abramson. “If I do that in a book, that’s plagiarism. That’s word-for-word stealing other people’s work.”
“That’s your position. I don’t see it that way,” she replied.
.@brianstelter to ex-NYT editor Jill Abramson: “It doesn’t matter if I put a footnote 300 pages later. If I do that in a book, that’s plagiarism. That’s word for word stealing other people’s work”
“That’s your position. I don’t see it that way,” she says https://t.co/kQyrCuLkjI pic.twitter.com/t8nBEeejeh
— Reliable Sources (@ReliableSources) February 10, 2019
Abramson admitted she erred in the crediting of sources and said the paragraphs in question would meet the New York Times’ standard for “things that should be promptly corrected.”
“There was no attempt to pass off someone’s ideas, opinions, and phrasings as my own,” she added. “These were all factual passages that unfortunately did not match up exactly to the right footnotes, but they are credited in the footnotes elsewhere.”