FAITH Hill is a country crossover superstar. It's pretty hard to argue otherwise.
I can write that here and be relatively confident that, although my thought is not very original (certainly anyone familiar with Faith Hill knows that fact), I'm not stealing someone else's thought, because most folks familiar with the multi-genre singer would label her as such. She started out her career singing country and now she markets herself as a country-pop hybrid. What else can I say about Faith Hill? She's married to Tim McGraw, another musician, she's sold millions of CDs, she has numerous endorsement contracts, she's beautiful. What if I said she's "effectively leaving any traces of country music in the dust?"
That's one way to talk about Faith Hill. Unfortunately, it's already been said by Mike Lipton of Launch Music on Yahoo! I tend to agree with the thought; why can't I say it too?
Without citing the source of the text, printing those words is plagiarizing, plain and simple. As a reporter, a columnist, reviewer, student -- as a writer in general -- you cannot use previously published words without at least proper citation. Unfortunately, an Arts & Entertainment reporter for The Cavalier Daily failed to follow this first rule of journalism, and the CD, until Tuesday, was unaware.
On Tuesday the CD ran a retraction on the A&E page indicating that the author of seven reviews used without permission pieces of text from at least the following sources: The New York Daily News, The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News, The Arizona Republic, The Hollywood Reporter, The Sunday Republican, The Winnipeg Sun, The Independent, eFolkMusic.org, the BBC, Hollywood.com, PopMatters.com, Entertainment Weekly, Launch Music on Yahoo! and filmcritic.com.
The author plagiarized. The evidence confirming this is shocking.
Kirk Honeycutt, a staple critic of the Hollywood Reporter, opened his review of "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" by saying that "watching 'Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle' is like being trapped inside a pinball machine operated by a 6-year-old having a sugar rush. Noise and movement occupy the entire 105 minutes, yet there is not a single coherent moment or imaginative idea in all the chaos."
The Cavalier Daily, in a July 21 review of the same movie, notes "In fact, watching 'Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle' is best compared to being trapped inside a pinball machine operated by a 6-year-old on a sugar high. Noise and movement occupy the entire 105 minutes, yet there is not a single coherent moment or imaginative idea in all the chaos."
Incidents as blatant as this occur several times in that article alone. It is as if the author googled "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle," found a well-written article (who knows if the author even agreed with the review?), cut and pasted, and maybe took the effort to hit Shift-F7 to find a few, well, one synonym: A "sugar rush" becomes a "sugar high." That miniscule change is not enough even to deem this an example of paraphrasing, which is still forbidden without proper citation.
On Aug. 29, the CD ran a review on the Disney flick "Freaky Friday." In it, the author, in reference to the movie, pointedly claims that "the material here is not exactly the freshest." The assertion is truer than we the readers even knew. Ty Burr of the Boston Globe said much the same of "Freaky Friday" on Aug. 6: "The material here may not be the freshest." The material in this piece, while not as significantly plagiarized as other articles by the author, certainly is not fresh, new, innovative, and, sadly, it's unoriginal. It's been stolen.
There is more I could document, but these are examples enough of the author's sheer disregard for the most basic rule of journalism: Write your own stuff.
And if it's not yours, cite it.
How then, did the CD deal with this egregious theft?
The A&E section ran a page-long sidebar retraction citing all sources that were found to be used by the author without citation. The CD apologized to its readers "that these articles were published." Good. The articles rightfully have been removed from CavalierDaily.com, but as of Friday, the retraction printed on the A&E page is not available anywhere on the site. The CD should have a section online for corrections and retractions, as do most newspapers. (WashingtonPost.com, for instance, has a "corrections" link on its homepage sidebar.)
The Managing Board spoke with both the A&E section editors and the author and informed the author that their relationship, in effect, was terminated, and that no part of her work would ever be part of The Cavalier Daily again. Good.
Because plagiarism is such a dishonorable act in journalism, the CD should have written how they dealt with the situation in the lead editorial space. It's understandable that a paper might not want to air its dirty personnel laundry in public, but in light of the recent Jayson Blair embarrassment at the New York Times, the CD would have been wise to come down hard on this practice and reassure its readers with something stronger than a retraction. Certainly these incidents of intellectual theft are not the kind of thing that any reputable newspaper, student or professional, would wish to endure.
An editor-writer relationship is based on trust. We cannot expect an editor to read every publication out there and verify that each and every word in each and every story has not been printed elsewhere, especially in the fast-paced world of daily journalism. What we must expect, however, is that members of the media are educated about what they can and cannot do. And they cannot plagiarize. Plain and simple.
Don't do it. Don't do it writing for the Cav Daily; don't do it writing a paper for a physics class. Don't do it. It is dishonorable and it is theft. It undermines the colleagues, the superiors, the very establishment with which one is associated.
The Cavalier Daily is an award-winning student newspaper. There are certificates plastered all over the production room, and with good reason. Hopefully, the staff will learn from this situation and become an even stronger, better publication.
Nonetheless, the staff must take every effort to assure its readers that this will not happen again. The managing editor met with department editors to explain the situation and emphasize that this kind of practice is unacceptable. The department editors, who have a much closer relationship with the writers themselves, now must re-educate every writer on the inexcusable practice of plagiarism.
It was a dark week for the CD, but, if the staff takes the proper steps -- and from talking to them, it looks like they are -- this will not be a subject I'll have to confront in this space again.
(Emily Kane's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.)
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