NYT big Jill Abramson accused of plagiarism in new book, and boy, is it bad

Jill Abramson, the former New York Times editor who carries a little plastic Obama doll in her purse for comfort, has written quite a book, trying to describe the news industry the same way the great David Halberstam once did in "The Powers That Be" in the 1970s. She examines four news outfits, plus Facebook, in an attempt to replicate Halberstam's tome about how the news industry evolved in her new book, titled: "Merchants of Truth." Her conclusion? Legacy media rules. Upstart media has no value.

After a big buildup from this, she's got a problem: She's being accused of plagiarism.

Here's the New York Times's generally positive review from Jan. 22:

The episode [Abramson's firing from the New York Times], in more ways than one, set Abramson on a path that would produce “Merchants of Truth,” her book examining four news organizations trying to sail through the storm of digital transformation: BuzzFeed, Vice, The Washington Post and The Times. It’s partly a memoir and partly a work of investigative reporting. But it’s mostly an audit of an industry that has spent much of the past decade wetting its pants in fear of digital technology and then worrying about whether to go to the dry cleaners. And it’s a damn good read.

Abramson's pious, pompous, and plummy conclusion? Old ways are best, reporting flourishes when it's left in the hands of the legacy media and, kid you not, its heirs. Any media upstarts challenging this particular press can only be punky little idiots.

She'd get away with this except that one of those punky little idiots at one of the agencies she decried ... has found that Abramson, doyenne of the Times and guardian of its claimed values, plagiarized the heck out of other people's work in her book.

VICE contributor Michael C. Moynihan put out an amazing string of 10 tweets showing instance after instance. Look at this - I'll include a few and the rest can be checked out here:

So...Jill Abramson's book has finally hit bookstore shelves. A few weeks ago, reading a galley copy, I noticed an egregious error about my colleague @adrs. She tweeted it out, a shit storm followed, Abramson corrected the mistake. — Michael C Moynihan (@mcmoynihan) February 6, 2019

*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...plagiarized passages. — Michael C Moynihan (@mcmoynihan) February 6, 2019

The bottom line is that progressives/liberals really are not that smart.

And they think they will never be caught.

And if they are, they think because they are a progressive/liberal, it doesn’t count.

I’m amazed that anyone in that industry with any self-awareness is surprised that the average person is no longer willing to pay people to lie to them.

It’s really that simple. I’m shocked the business model lasted as long as it did.

Dems not averse to a little “borrowing.” Like one of those compilations like Hillary Clinton In Her Own Words (Seal Books,2014).
Sometimes they just forget to give credit.

Liberal historian icon Doris Kearns Goodwin claimed her junior assistant researchers accidentally forgot to mention the sources of paragraphs she lifted.

https://www.forbes.com/2002/02/27/0227goodwin.html#d4b6f2c62914 also——
“Goodwin herself seemed trapped in a hall of mirrors last month after The Weekly Standard accused her of plagiarizing from several sources in …”

The New York Times is only looked up to by liberal elites because of the cachet of New York in its name. It really is garbage. If it were the same content and published in Omaha as the Omaha Times no one would cite it let alone read it. Their biggest problem is they publish unfiltered all the DNC stuff fed them by the DNC and anyone in the political world with a liberal agenda because the trash they are fed fits the views of editorial staff and publisher as well as their liberal readership.In the past when there was no internet they knew they could get away with it. No more now. They do seem to have had a number of incidents where their staff writers have been caught making up stories over the last few years.

I recently ran into a plagiarism problem.
I was in the process of submitting a book to a publisher and the publisher’s plagiarism search software found several instances of online content matching passages in my book. It took me the better part of 3 weeks to discover that the online content was from a patent I wrote from 8 years ago. Basically, I was plagiarizing my own work. Is that even possible?

Plagiarism is the practice of taking *someone else’s* work or ideas and passing them off as one’s *own*. By definition, then, you cannot plagiarize yourself. However, it’s always advisable for authors to provide citations to their prior published work if they want to use it again.

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