Following Josh Marshall’s exposure of New York Times’ high profile columnistMaureen Dowd’s copying of his blogpost (and her subsequent ‘apology for her error’: where have we heard that one recently?), Salon’s Glenn Greenwald describes how mainstream papers and unscrupulous paid journalists prey on the work of mostly unpaid bloggers:
…now that online traffic is such an important part of the business model of newspapers and print magazines, traffic generated by links from online venues and bloggers is of great value to them. That’s why they engage in substantial promotional activities to encourage bloggers to link to and write about what they produce. Beyond that, it is also very common — as the Dowd/Marshall episode illustrates — for traditional media outlets and establishment journalists to use and even copy content produced online and then present it as their own, typically without credit. Many, many reporters, television news producers and the like read online political commentary and blogs and routinely take things they find there.
Typically, the uncredited use of online commentary doesn’t rise to the level of blatant copying — plagiarism — that Maureen Dowd engaged in. It’s often not even an ethical breach at all. Instead, traditional media outlets simply take stories, ideas and research they find online and pass it off as their own. In other words — to use their phraseology — they act parasitically on blogs by taking content and exploiting it for their benefit.
Exactly. A number of times I’ve thought I’ve seen ideas or things from this blog pop up in altered form in the Guardian’s comment pieces. But any similarity is usually too slight to pin down and most probably coincidental, anyhow. Think of the sheer volume of words that are written and published in English online just in the course of one day. There must be constant concurrences of ideas and the subject itself often suggests the tone and words used, so similarities are inevitable. ]
But I did notice it was usually dated in the vicinity of a visit by a particular IP address – we have few enough readers that I do notice that – but again it means little, if anything at all. Though they’re few, we get visits from all over. For all I know the journalist is based in Moldova or Yorkshire, not using a particular network in the City.
Though an unscrupulous hack looking for story ideas to vampire might well trawl low traffic blogs rather than popular ones – because there’s less chance of anyone spotting likenesses, there’s no real way to ever really pin something so slight down.
It’s probably sheer chance, a zeitgeistian thing and the sensible voice in my head tells me I’m being egotistical and paranoid. I should stop being so silly. It’s all very nebulous, and as nice as it would be to think anybody actually read this blog rather than came across it accidentally looking for dancing kitten .gifs, who on earth would want to copy my stuff? It’s just me ranting and there are millions of better bloggers to steal ideas from.
What could I do about it, anyhow? Complain? It’s hardly plagiarism, it’s impossible to prove and probably just my ego anyway.
So there I’ve left it.
However, one TPM blogger was inspired by Maureen Dowd’s plagiarism to go further. Unexpectedly he found he too had a vampire – so he dragged him smoking into the sunlight.
… I started using teh Google on some of my older blog titles. About five minutes later, I found a case of out-and-out, wholesale plagiarism of one of my own pieces.
I wrote the blog entry “Michele Bachmann – Unstable AND Unable” here on TPM on February 20, 2009.
A writer on Salem-News.com, Dorsett Bennett, wrote this article on February 27. To conserve space, I won’t quote it here.
The first half of Bennett’s article is, well, my blog.
You know I really run some of my text or post headers through google too. I wonder what would turn up?
Nothing at all, most likely.
There’s my problem. Any similarity’s entirely in my head. That’s why I haven’t googled and I won’t google any of my writing. I couldn’t take the disappointment. I’ll stick with my nebulous suspicions while leaving the possibility that someone actually read something and liked it enough to steal it it still that, a possibility.
UPDATE:
Soopercali’s comment to Glenn’s post hits the target I was circling around spot-on:
What I’ve seen happen again and again is that the corporate media rips off the context in which bloggers place a story.
Bloggers will take a mainstream story and contrast it with something the original author missed. That’s when the rest of the media (most often, cable news talk shows) lifts the story and acts as if they thought of it themselves. It happens far too often to count.
That’s exactly it.
