Merchants of Truth II

Although I think the general argument Jill Abramson sets forth in her book, as compressed in yesterday's entry, is valuable and perhaps in the end sound, I have to include here the unhappy truth that Abramson is an unfortunate bearer of that message.

Her book, Merchants of Truth, contains some glaring instances of plagiarism. This comes especially in the section of the book devoted to the news website Vice News, seen by some (by not by JA) as a wave-of-the-future institution.

Back in the late spring of 2005, the Ryerson Review of Journalism carried a piece by Nicolle Weeks, headlined "Bigot or Champion of Truth?" Weeks argued that Vice is much more the former than the latter. She says this, about the website's co-founder Gavin McInnes:

In August 2003, McInnes wrote a column in The American Conservative, a magazine run by Pat Buchanan. In the magazine, he called young people a bunch of knee-jerk liberals (a phrase McInnes and his cronies use often) who’ll believe anyone with dark skin over anyone with light skin. He laments the liberal views of most of the people who pick up his magazine, saying they’re “brainwashed by communist propaganda.”

So fourteen years pass, and it seems that Abramson's discussion of Vice and McInnes contains the following:

He wrote a column in The American Conservative, a magazine run by Pat Buchanan. calling young people a bunch of knee-jerk liberals (a phrase McInnes and his ilk often used) who would believe anyone with dark skin over anyone with light skin. He lamented the liberal views of his magazine's readers, saying they were "brainwashed by communist propaganda."

Another example: in 2010 Time Out did a critical piece about Jason Mojica, a Vice News editor. It included the following passage.

When he lived in Chicago, Jason Mojica sang in punk bands, ran a record label and owned a cafe and a video rental shop (Jinx and Big Brother, respectively), he even wrote a few art reviews for this magazine. In December 2006, Mojica and two friends traveled to Chad with a camera to explore why Darfur couldn't be saved. The result was the 2008 documentary, Christmas in Darfur.

Again, this is lifted with only limited changes and plunked down into Abramson's book. There she has it thus:

When he lived in Chicago, Majica sang in punk clubs, ran a record label, and owned the Jinx Cafe and a video rental shop called Big Brother. He wrote art reviews. In December 2006, he and two friends traveled to Chad with a camera to explore why Darfur couldn't be saved. The result was the 2008 documentary, Christmas in Darfur.

There are other examples, but those two examples give the flavor.

When she became the executive editor of the paper of record back in 2011, some delighted observers hailed her as a hero, a breaker of a glass ceiling. etc. When she was kicked out of that job three years later they were dismayed or outraged on her behalf. It was, in short, like election day 2016 but in slo motion.

Her book may incidentally have proven that women are guilty of precisely the sort of offenses men have long committed.

I

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