Plagiarism and how to catch it
You may have heard on TV yesterday that Tim Goeglein, a senior White House aide, had resigned after it was discovered he had plagiarized parts of columns he had written for his home-town newspaper, The News-Sentinel, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, over the past seven years. I thought I’d shed a little light on this from a publisher’s perspective, and hopefully give a cautionary tip to new writers.
Writing columns was not Goeglein’s primary job for President Bush. He had far more important duties having to do with liaison and promoting the President’s policies. I think perhaps he was a wannabe writer (even though he did have a journalism degree) who wrote the columns on the side. Now this plagiarism discovery has destroyed his career and reputation.
According to the newspaper, 20 of 38 columns Mr. Goeglein published since 2000 included plagiarized material. A graduate of the town’s high school, the 44-year-old Goeglein has been writing columns for the paper since 1985.
It was an internet search that exposed the plagiarism! A former columnist for the newspaper, Nancy Nall, sometimes used her Website to poke fun at his columns. Goeglein’s column on Thursday included a reference to a “notable professor of philosophy at Dartmouth,” Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey. She was curious about this professor so searched the internet, then discovered that major portions of the column were copied wholesale from an article published 10 years ago in The Dartmouth Review.
That’s how my magazine sometimes discovers plagiarized articles before we make the mistake of publishing them. My Editorial Assistant, Lisa Nourse, began doing internet searches quite a while back for every article submitted to us. We look for key phrases and names. I expect all publications will begin doing this. The internet makes it easy to cut and paste someone else’s writing and submit it as your own to an unwary publication, but Google and other search engines make it just as easy to catch the plagiarists.
Only a couple of months ago we discovered (through our standard Google search) that two articles submitted to us by the same author had been partly plagiarized. We contacted the author, told him about it, and he apologized, then turned around and got one of the articles published in another magazine. Since we publishers tend to get to know each other, and none of us want to publish plagiarized material, I informed the other publisher of what happened. The lesson here for wannabe writers is that you may get away with stealing material for a while, but you will eventually be caught.
White House staffer Goeglein admitted his theft. He said, "It is true. I am entirely at fault. It was wrong of me. There are no excuses."
News-Sentinel Editor Kerry Hubartt said, “There was no reason for it that I can see,” emphasizing that Mr. Goeglein had submitted the columns voluntarily and had no deadlines to meet. “He was not under any pressure.”
I don’t know if it’s the case with Goeglein, but I think some wannabe writers probably don’t even understand what plagiarism is, nor how serious it is. When you plagiarize you steal someone else’s intellectual property (just like stealing anything else of theirs) and try and publish it as your own thoughts and words. Most seasoned writers see this as a major intellectual crime. Good writing is difficult, and it deserves recognition. Plagiarizing is easy, and it deserves exposure and condemnation. Goeglein destroyed his very successful political career for what seems to me to be foolish attempts to be what he was not.
March 2nd, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Thanks, Dave! We “original” writers really appreciate your efforts to catch out the plagiarists. I think it’s a problem that goes back to the first written words, and I agree with you, many people simply don’t understand the concept. Thnaks for spelling it out.