Did Jill Abramson Plagiarize Ian Milhiser?
Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times, has an article in the current issue of New York making the case for the impeachment of Clarence Thomas. I don’t have any problems with the substance of the piece, though I don’t think Abramson breaks much new ground on the Thomas sexual harassment front or with respect to the fact that Thomas committed perjury in his Senate confirmation hearings. (Having co-authored, with Jane Mayer, the book on Thomas and Anita Hill, Abramson knows this case better than almost anyone.)
My problem is that Abramson seems to have lifted, sometimes word-for-word, an extended passage from a October 2016 blog post by Ian Milhiser.
Here is Milhiser:
He [Clarence Thomas] joined the majority decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, holding for the first time that an employer’s religious objections can trump the rights of their women employees. And, in one of the most under-reported decisions of the last several years, he cast the key fifth vote to hobble the federal prohibition on sexual harassment in the workplace.
…
In Vance v. Ball State University, a 5–4 Supreme Court redefined the word “supervisor” such that it means virtually nothing in many modern workplaces. Under Vance, a person’s boss only counts as their “supervisor” if they have the authority to make a “significant change in employment status, such as hiring, firing, failing to promote, reassignment with significantly different responsibilities, or a decision causing a significant change in benefits.”
One problem with this decision is that modern workplaces often vest the power to make such changes in employment status in a distant HR office, even though the employee’s real boss wields tremendous power over them.
Here is Abramson:
He joined the majority decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, holding that an employer’s religious objections can override the rights of its women employees.
And, in one of the most underreported decisions of the last several years, Thomas cast the key fifth vote to hobble the federal prohibition on harassment in the workplace. The 5-4 decision in 2013’s Vance v. Ball State University tightened the definition of who counts as a supervisor in harassment cases. The majority decision in the case said a person’s boss counts as a “supervisor” only if he or she has the authority to make a “significant change in employment status, such as hiring, firing, failing to promote, reassignment with significantly different responsibilities, or a decision causing a significant change in benefits.” That let a lot of people off the hook. In many modern workplaces, the only “supervisors” with those powers are far away in HR offices, not the hands-on boss who may be making a worker’s life a living hell.
The number of direct repetitions—of words, phrases, and sentences—is sizable. The faint rewording of other passages is plain. The choice of quotations from and description of the Ball State case, the set-up and syntax of the whole section, the conceptual choices (Thomas “cast the key fifth vote,” which Abramson borrows from Milhiser in order to suggest, wrongly, that Thomas was somehow the last vote cobbled together by the conservative majority, or to suggest, improbably, that if Thomas had not been approved by the Senate, a more liberal justice would have been nominated in his place and, 15 years later, would have cast a different vote) and conceptual ordering: Abramson’s passage mimics Milhiser’s to a high degree.
Abramson is not a rookie reporter. She’s one of the giants of contemporary journalism.
In case the editors at New York revise the web version of the article (it appears in the print version of the February 19 issue of the magazine), here are a screen shot of the relevant section in Abramson’s piece and three screen shots of the relevant sections from Milhiser’s.
Update (1 pm)
I just remembered that Abramson was first made managing editor in the wake of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal, which Bill Keller, who was made editor after Howell Raines was forced to resign over the scandal, said influenced his desire to change the Times culture. Part of that change involved bringing on Abramson as managing editor.
After some googling, I found that while she was managing editor, Abramson had to deal with at least two plagiarism incidents involving reporters at the Times. In the first incident, which seems to have involved less outright copying without attribution than Abramson utilizes in her New York piece, Abramson admitted the accusation of plagiarism that had been leveled against the Times reporter:
Did Barrionuevo commit plagiarism?
“Yes,” says Abramson. “I think when you take material almost word-for-word and don’t credit it, it is.”
In the second incident, she was more circumspect:
It appears that Alexei did not fully understand Times policy of not using wire boilerplate and giving credit when we do make use of such material. As I mentioned to you, other papers do permit unattributed use of such material. He should not have inserted wire material into his Times coverage without attribution.
That said, because the new examples do not involve many words or an original thought, the transgression does not seem to be as serious as the first instance on paco.
I’ll leave it to readers to adjudicate which of these two cases is more relevant to what Abramson did in this New York article. Either way, she seems to have violated the very policies she upheld while she was an editor at the Times. And in a link-laden piece like this, she should, minimally, have credited and linked to Milhiser.
Update (February 20)
As I expected they would do, New York has slightly addressed the problem, claiming it was due to an editing error, while skirting the larger question of what Abramson did.
In Abramson’s original piece, there were two sentences—”He joined” and “And, in one of the most underreported…”—that were lifted almost verbatim from Milhiser’s post. In their fix, New York doesn’t address the first sentence at all but does this with the second sentence:
And, as Think Progress noted, “in one of the most underreported decisions of the last several years, Thomas cast the key fifth vote to hobble the federal prohibition on harassment in the workplace.”*
And if you follow the asterisk, you’ll find this at the bottom of the piece:
*Due to an editing error, the original version failed to attribute this quoted sentence to its author.
So the magazine doesn’t address the almost verbatim lifting in the first sentence or the heavy reliance on Milhiser’s setup and usage and quotations throughout Abramson’s description of the Ball State case. It also claims that the failure to acknowledge Milhiser in the sentence that was so idiosyncratic in its usage that no one could claim it wasn’t lifted from Milhiser, that that failure to attribute was due to an editing error.
Here are the two screenshots of the changes.