Former New York Times editor accused of plagiarism
A FORMER New York Times executive editor has been accused of plagiarism in her new book looking at how journalism has evolved over the past decade.
Jill Abramson, whose book Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts was published this week, has denied claims of plagiarism but promised to review the passages in question.
The claims were made by Michael
Moynihan, a Vice News journalist, who accused Ms Abramson of listing passages from publications such as The
New Yorker, Time Out and the Columbia Journalism Review.
In a series of tweets on Wednesday, Mr Moynihan listed several examples from three chapters in the book relating to Vice and compared them to passages published by other news outlets.
Mr Moynihan suggested his scrutiny of the book began after spotting “an egregious error” about his colleague Arielle Duhaime-ross, who was wrongly identified as transgender in an initial review copy.
“All three chapters on Vice were clotted with mistakes. Lots of them. The truth promised in Merchants of Truth was often not true. While trying to corroborate certain claims, I noticed that it also contained… plagiarised passages,” he wrote.
The book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, described the book as “the definitive report on the disruption of the news media over the last decade”.
Appearing on Fox News, Ms Abramson said: “All I can tell you is I certainly didn’t plagiarise in my book and there’s 70 pages of footnotes showing where I got the information.”
She also suggested “the attacks” from some at Vice News “reflect their unhappiness with what I consider a balanced portrayal”.
Afterwards, the author tweeted: “I take seriously the issues raised and will review the passages in question.”
In a separate statement, Simon & Schuster said that the author had given the news organisations covered in the book “ample time and opportunity to comment on the content, and where appropriate the author made changes and corrections.
“If upon further examination changes or attributions are deemed necessary we stand ready to work with the author in making those revisions.”