Regret the Error

Acting on a reader tip, Slate’s Jack Shafer busted the Daily Beast’s Gerald Posner for lifting from the Miami Herald:

Veteran journalist Gerald Posner acknowledged today that he copied five sentences from a Miami Herald article this week for a piece he wrote for the Daily Beast. The Daily Beast appended an editor’s note to the beginning of Posner’s piece today, explaining that the copying was “inadvertent” and that the Daily Beast has deleted the copied passages …

When asked whether what Posner did was plagiarism, Daily Beast Executive Editor Edward Felsenthal didn’t dodge. Reading aloud from the definition of plagiarism on Dictionary.com—”the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work”—he agreed that that’s what Posner did. “Yeah, you’d have to say it’s plagiarism,” he said. “I do believe it was inadvertent.”

Posner, the Daily Beast’s chief investigative reporter, didn’t make any excuses, either. And he made no effort to escape the P-word, which writers caught stealing copy usually do.

Stating that he was “horrified” at what he did, Posner agreed that it constitutes plagiarism. But he couldn’t figure out how he did it.

He said he had no memory of having seen the Herald story, describing himself as “absolutely sure” he did not see it before sending his own story to Beast editors. But that memory must be wrong, he said, because the similarities between the two pieces are too great, and the Herald’s story was posted before he e-mailed his to his editors at 2:03 a.m. on Feb. 2.

Here’s the editor’s note:

Editor’s Note: In an earlier version of this article, five sentences were inadvertently copied from a Miami Herald report without attribution. The Daily Beast has removed the sentences and regrets the error.

Update Feb. 8: Shafer kept digging and turned up more examples of plagiarism by Posner. As a result, Posner has been suspended from the Daily Beast. From Shafer’s column:

Slate reader Gregory Gelembuik and I have uncovered additional examples of plagiarism by Posner in the Daily Beast from the Texas Lawyer, a Miami Herald blog, a Miami Herald editorial, a Miami Herald article, and a health care journalism blog.

Beast executive editor Edward Felsenthal told Shafer that, “We will be suspending Gerald Posner while we review his articles, to return if we are satisfied that he has taken the necessary steps to avoid this in the future.”

Posner also issued a statement:

… I now realize that a method of compiling information that I have used successfully since 1984 on book research, obviously does not work in a failsafe manner at the warp speed of the net. Some of the incidents raised by Jack Shafer are not plagiarism, but are instances in which I received the same exact prepared quotation or statement from a police officer or press agent as other reporters. But others are mistakes that I deeply regret.

Update Feb. 14: After being informed that the Beast’s internal investigation turned up additional examples of plagiarism, Posner resigned. Here’s part of the statement he issued on his website:

This afternoon I received a call from Edward Felsenthal, the excellent managing editor of The Daily Beast. He informed me that as part of the Beast’s internal investigation, they had uncovered more instances in earlier articles of mine in which there the same problems of apparent plagiarism as the ones originally brought to life last Friday by Shafer. I instantly offered my resignation and Edward accepted.

Posner goes on at length to try and explain/justify his actions and defend his work as a journalist. He blames the demands of writing for the web, among other things. I won’t quote from it because I find his explanations unconvincing. As did Shafer prior to the resignation.

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