WHO TO BELIEVE in the war of words between Salon, the feisty Internet magazine, and journalists who complain that its “scoops” and well-publicized charges against the American Spectator, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications are little more than nuggets of disinformation, sponsored by the White House? this is not a close call for someone like me, who has been contributing to the Spectator since 1975: I assume that my acquaintances tell the truth. For disinterested observers, however, the choice is not so easy.
This past Sunday, Tim Russert, of NBC’s Meet the Press, interviewed Salon‘s Washington correspondent, Jonathan Broder, about his assertions that the Spectator paid cash to Whitewater witness David Hale in exchange for dirt on the Clintons. And two days before that, the Washington Post‘s media reporter, Howard Kurtz, wrote a long, voluminously detailed piece describing Broder’s work for Salon, and the sniping that has broken out between Broder, Salon colleague Murray Waas, and Clinton partisans like Joe Conason of the New York Observer, on the one hand, and their critics.
Kurtz described a world-weary, slightly bemused Broder, a veteran “low-key and measured” foreign correspondent “with the patient air of a man who’s covered his share of wars.” And a journalist who doesn’t walk away from a challenge: Asked to comment on columnist Robert Novak, who has been critical of Salon‘s reporting, Broder described him as “dishonest and politically malevolent. I wouldn’t call him a journalist.”
Well, no matter how anyone may feel about Novak, who is certainly capable of defending himself, “dishonest” is a curious adjective to escape the lips of Jonathan Broder. For the one feature of Broder’s career that neither Howard Kurtz nor Tim Russert saw fit to mention — and the singular detail that tells us all we need to know about Jonathan Broder — is his experience as a plagiarist. And therein lies a tale.
In March 1988, Jonathan Broder was fired from his job as Middle East correspondent for the Chicago Tribune because he had plagiarized a story by Joel Greenberg in the Jerusalem Post. As often happens in such instances, Broder’s friends in the business were sorrowful rather than angry. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times lamented the fall of a “fine reporter,” and Marcus Eliason of the Associated Press invented a novel rationale for Broder’s duplicity: “This was a case of using another person’s words to describe a situation he had been in himself.” Most interesting of all were the words of Broder’s boss, Tribune editor James Squires: “This was an aberration,” he declared. “There is an explanation for what happened,” he added, “but there is no justification.”
The explanation, of course, was that Broder had stolen Greenberg’s words and published them as his own. And Squires and his colleagues at the Tribune knew perfectly well it was no aberration. Seven years earlier, in August 1981, when the United States shot down two Libyan jets in the Mediterranean, the Tribune transmitted a profile of Col. Qaddafi, by Jonathan Broder, over the wire. I remember the occasion well. I was associate editor of the Lexington (Ky.) Herald at the time, and as I read Broder’s piece, it became quickly evident that he had lifted generous portions of a two-month-old Newsweek story on the Libyan dictator. After reading the texts, I telephoned jack Fuller, editorial page editor of the Tribune, and advised him, as a courtesy, to compare Broder’s profile and the Newsweek article. Fuller, who is now president of the Tribune‘s parent company, agreed to do so; and shortly thereafter a kill advisory for the Broder piece came over the wire.
I never heard from Fuller, but in 1988 I did write to Squires to suggest that Broder’s theft of Joel Greenberg’s piece was no aberration. Squires is famous for his volcanic temper, and my reward was a nasty rejoinder which I cherish among my papers. (Squires subsequently resigned from the Tribune and was last seen in service, briefly, as H. Ross Perot’s adviser-spokesman in 1992.) Broder was later employed by the San Francisco Examiner, where he met his Salon colleague, Murray Waas.
I asked Howard Kurtz if he was aware of Jonathan Broder’s history as a plagiarist, and he said that he knew about it but had, after some reflection, decided it was not relevant to the present story. Fair enough. It is worth wondering, however, whether Kurtz would have exercised such scruples if the subject had been a contributor to, say, the “fiercely conservative American Spectator,” as he calls it. Probably not, and he shouldn’t. There is no more despicable action by a writer than stealing someone else’s words and, when caught, offering lame excuses for the deed. And yet plagiarists — Molly Ivins, Ruth Shalit, Nina Totenberg, Jonathan Broder — seems to go from strength to strength, unbowed by anything like shame, honored and protected by their colleagues.
Philip Terzian writes a Washington column for the Providence Journal.
