Plagiarism
A student is working on his English paper. It is 2 a.m. and he is terribly tired and wants to retreat back to his bed. He shouldn’t have stayed up all night and played Halo with his friends he thought. He has only written one paragraph and has over 1,500 words left to go. He then quickly goes on to a Web site about English literature. He copies and pastes what he wants into the rest of “his” paper, “his” work and goes back to bed. This is a classic case of plagiarism and is very serious problem
According to the Random House Compact Unabridged Dictionary, plagiarism is defined as, “The use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work.”
In addition to that, no proper credit or acknowledgement is given to the original source. That is why plagiarism is branded as an act of dishonesty. Plagiarism is an infectious stigma that corrupts academic progress and also disgraces the field of journalism. Unfortunately, it happens all the time and there are many of those “Really high up there” cases where plagiarism has impacted a student, a reporter or a professor’s career. And believe me, it’s always for the worse.
One particular example of plagiarism occurred when historian Doris Kearns Goodwin admitted to copying several passages from other authors in her best-seller “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys” right before she was to participate as a judge for the Pulitzer Prize in 2002. As a result, Goodwin withdrew from the Pulitzer Prizes. According to an online news archive from CNN, the board was left to sort out Goodwin’s mess.
“Pulitzer board adminstrator Seymour Topping announced Goodwin’s withdrawal Monday and added that the Pulitzer Prize board ‘had made no decision on the controversy,’”
This had a very negative impact on the Pulitzer board because it was under bad press and the board had to recover from such controversy in order to maintain its high standard and reputation for the Pulitzer Prize. Goodwin also resigned as a commentator on PBS’ “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” It must have been the guilt of knowing what she did was wrong.
In 2001, renowned historian Stephen Ambrose had his career in controversial shambles after an article from the Weekly Standard by Fred Barnes first discovered his book “The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s over Germany” contained several identical words and phrases from Thomas Childers’s 1995 “Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II.”
“The two books are similar in more than just subject. Whole passages in ‘The Wild Blue’ are barely distinguishable from those in ‘Wings of Morning.’ Sentences in Ambrose’s book are identical to sentences in Childers’s. Key phrases from ‘Wings of Morning,’ such as ‘glittering like mica’ and ’up, up, up,’ are repeated verbatim in ‘The Wild Blue.’ None of these- the passages, sentences, phrases is put in quotation marks and ascribed to Childers,” Barnes said.
Consequently, there was a tireless influx of news stories and online articles about Ambrose’s use of plagiarism. All of them as a media called out Ambrose on his dishonest and unethical work. In the end, Ambrose released a public apology but his reputation and career as historic writer was ultimately destroyed.
Then there is the infamous reporter from the New York Times Jayson Blair who had plagiarized reporter Macarena Hernandez’s story about a missing soldier in Iraq from the Sun Antonio Express-News. This led to an investigation by the New York Times against Blair and they found out that 36 of the 73 stories that he wrote between Oct. 2002 and May 2003 were either made up or taken from other sources and were not given proper credit.
Blair was inevitably fired from the The New York Times. It was a disgrace and the Times referred to Blair’s career as a “profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper,”
This is plagiarism on a massive scale and is completely unacceptable.
In short, I would never want to commit such dishonest and unethical work. Plagiarism ultimately leads to the destruction of one’s work and career. Any student, writer or reporter should learn a valuable lesson from these previous examples. It is important that your work is ethical at all times and should exhibit good intentions and objective honesty if you use a source in your work, you must cite it or give credit when it’s due or else it is nothing but plagiarism.
