The Esquire article in question is Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, which is widely considered one of the great magazine features of all time. Esquire calls it “a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism — a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction.”

Two articles published by The Post online and in its print editions earlier this month contained substantial material that was borrowed and duplicated, without attribution, from The Arizona Republic newspaper.

The articles described an indictment of Jared Lee Loughner for murder and attempted murder in the January rampage that wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the subsequent unsealing of court records supporting a search warrant in connection with the case.

In the article about the indictment, which appeared on The Post’s website on March 4 and on page A3 of the print edition of March 5, two paragraphs about a provision in federal civil rights law that applies to hate crimes were copied from the Republic’s work. The article also included without attribution other facts previously reported by the Republic.

The article detailing what investigators found in their search of Loughner’s home, which appeared online on March 10 and was published on page A3 in the newspaper of March 11, was substantially drawn from an article that appeared in The Republic. Ten of the article’s 15 paragraphs were copied in whole or in part from an article that first appeared in the Republic.

It is The Post’s policy that the use of material from other newspapers or sources must be properly attributed. The Post apologizes to the Arizona Republic and to its readers for this serious lapse.

The note did not name the guilty party, but media blogger Greg Mitchell did:

I'll ask the question I always do in this scenario: has the Post investigated Horwitz's previous work for other evidence of plagiarism?

Update March 16, 2011: Former Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz has additional information:

In fact, the people shown were museum staff members, who were asked by museum officials to be present in the galleries to provide scale and context for the photographs. The photographer acknowledged using the same procedure in other cases when an exhibition was not yet opened to the public.

Such staging of news pictures violates The Times’s standardsand the photographs should not have been published. (While pictures may show previews or similar situations before an exhibition opens, readers should not be given a misleading impressionabout the circumstances.) Link

I refer to the Malaysikini report Dr M: If they can make Avatar, they can make 9/11.

I can understand Malaysiakini not wanting to be labelled as anti-Semitic but I don’t think it is necessary to omit certain words which give a totally different interpretation of what I said in my speech at the General Conference for the support of Al-Quds.

What I said was: ‘Jews had always been a problem in European countries’.

You omitted ‘in European countries’ thus implying that what I said was not just the Europeans but Jews were a problem for everyone including the Muslims …

It goes on from there. Also note that the speech in question saw Dr Mohamad say 9/11 was staged in order to allow the U.S. to attack Muslim countries. Finally, the website appended this editor’s note to the letter:

Malaysiakini had inadvertently omitted the words ‘in European countries’ in Mahathir’s quote above. It should be “Jews have always been a problem in European countries”. The complete quote appears in the full version of Mahathir’s speech which Malaysiakini carried on the same day. We regret the error.

The Prototype column last Sunday, about customer innovation centers, reported on a program at the 3M Company’s headquarters in St. Paul and described the company as being “at the forefront of a movement” in which corporations meet face to face with customers to elicit feedback. After the column was published, The Times learned that 3M had provided travel and accommodations for the freelance writer during a visit to the company’s headquarters in November.

Times policy prohibits reporters from accepting such expenses or other payment from companies they cover. Had the editors known of the circumstances of the trip, the column would not have been published in that form. Link

An earlier version of this list entry was written by CNBC journalist David Faber and was solicited by Newsweek.com without accurately conveying to him the context in which it would appear. As a result, Faber, who was not shown the final edited item, appeared to be complicit in the criticism of a network colleague, which was not his intention. In light of the circumstances, we have removed the piece, we deeply regret its publication and we apologize to Faber and to CNBC for the error in judgment.

Thanks, @doughamlin!

The “Place” feature about Miami in the T magazine travel issue on Nov. 22 included a reference to the 8 oz. Burger Bar. The writer has had a long personal relationship with a co-owner of the restaurant; had editors known of that connection, the restaurant would not have been included in the article.

Credit to the NYTPicker for pointing out this issue.

A Nov. 10 “New Global Indian” online column by New York City freelance writer Mona Sarika has been found to contain information that was plagiarized from several publications, including the Washington Post, Little India, India Today and San Francisco magazine. In the column, “Homeward Bound,” about H-1B visa holders returning to India, Ms. Sarika also re-used direct quotes from other publications, without attribution, and changed the original speakers’ names to individuals who appear to be fabricated. The column is the only work by Ms. Sarika to be published by the Journal, and it has been removed from the Journal’s Web sites.

A person named Mona Sarika, who also identifies herself as a NYC-based freelancer, blogs for the Huffington Post. Her name also appears at other publications, all of whom should review her previous work.

UPDATE Dec. 6: HuffPo and Foreign Policy, two publications that published work by Sarika, have removed her articles. Here’s the notice from Foreign Policy:

In her Oct. 30, 2009 article for ForeignPolicy.com, “Pakistan’s Coming Horror,” freelance writer Mona Sarika plagiarized and misattributed quotes from these sources (1, 2) on the BBC’s Web site and, we believe, may have fabricated her interview subjects. We have pulled the article and will not run work by Ms. Sarika again. We apologize to our readers. —Foreign Policy

And here’s what HuffPo has placed where Sarika’s blog posts once appeared:

Editor’s Note: Due to repeated instances of plagiarism and misattribution, both on HuffPost and elsewhere, Mona Sarika’s work will no longer appear on The Huffington Post.

And here’s a statement that Mario Ruiz, vice president of media relations at Huffington Post, told Virginia M. Moncrieff for a post that appears on, yes, the Huffington Post:

“Once we establish that a story or blog post has been plagiarized, we remove the story from our site and revoke the plagiarist’s right to ever post on The Huffington Post again. We also remove all other posts by that blogger and add a note as to why we’ve done so.”

“This has actually been a very rare occurrence over the four-and-a-half years we’ve been publishing,” he said. “Our policy on any factual inaccuracy (not just plagiarism) is that any time the factual accuracy of a post is called into question, a blogger has 24 hours to either back up their facts or correct the error. If they don’t, their blogging privileges will be revoked.”

That’s an interesting bit of insight into how HuffPo handles accusations of inaccuracy. But one thing that Ruiz doesn’t mention is the site’s policy for acknowledging errors. In this case, it provided an editor’s note, but the note doesn’t detail exactly what was wrong with Sarika’s work on HuffPo. What did she plagiarize, and what was misattributed?

The New York Times Magazine fact checks all of its articles, but the process broke down when it came to the vending machine story. On Sunday, the Times published a lengthy Editor’s Note to explain the reporting, editing and fact checking errors. The Note:

An article in the Year in Ideas issue on Dec. 14, 2008, reported on Josh Klein, whose master’s thesis for New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program proposed “a vending machine for crows” that would enable the birds to exchange coins for peanuts. The article reported that beginning in June 2008, Klein tested the machine at the Binghamton Zoo, that the crows learned how to use it and that after a month the crows were actually scouring the ground for loose change.
The Times has since learned that Klein was never at the Binghamton Zoo, and there were no crows on display there in June 2008. He performed these experiments with captive crows in a Brooklyn apartment; he told the reporter about the Brooklyn crows but implied that his work with them was preliminary to the work at the zoo. Asked to explain these discrepancies, Klein now says he and the reporter had a misunderstanding about the zoo.
The reporter never called the zoo in Binghamton to confirm. And while the fact-checker did discuss the details with Klein, he did not call the zoo, as required under The Times’s fact-checking standards. In addition, the article said that Klein was working with graduate students at Cornell University and Binghamton University to study how wild crows make use of his machine, which does exist. Klein did get a professor at Binghamton to help him try it out twice in Ithaca, with assistance from a Binghamton graduate student, and it was not a success. Corvid experts who have since been interviewed have said that Klein’s machine is unlikely to work as intended.
These discrepancies were pointed out to The Times by the Binghamton professor several weeks after the article was published; this editors’ note was delayed for additional reporting. These details should have been discovered during the reporting and editing process. Had that happened, the article would not have been published.

The original story came in at just under 250 words; the Editor’s Note is close to 100 words longer. That’s a sign something was seriously wrong with the article. In the end, as the Note concludes, the story should never have made it into print. Even if Klein and the writer did have a “misunderstanding,” the fact checker should have discovered the truth and alerted the editor, who then should have killed the piece.

Magazine-style fact checking is currently journalism’s best system to prevent factual errors.  However, this example demonstrates that it’s far from perfect. Errors made by the source and writer were not caught by the editor and also escaped notice by the fact checker. The mistakes circumvented a process designed to catch and fix them.

Then, after publication, Klein chose not to bring the mistakes to the Times’ attention; it was up to a professor with a slight connection to the story to reveal the mistake.

Editor’s note: Some of the claims made by Charles Carlson included in this article were later found to be untrue. Several months after this story was printed, Carlson admitted he had lied about officiating tennis in the Beijing Olympics, and had also lied about growing up in England and having a personal connection to the Clintons. Hillary Clinton never shared her crème brulee torte with him. Carlson grew up in the United States–not in England. Carlson claims he was a communications director for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, but The Minnesota Daily has been unable to independently verify this. See a Daily article about Carlson on March 2 for details about these inaccuracies.

It comes six months after the Daily published a a rather fawning piece about Carlson. The Note was published in conjunction with a Daily report that detailed Carlson’s troubled relationship with the truth. From the original Daily piece about him:

He was a Beijing Olympics tennis official and is a University graduate student, GLBT rights advocate and director of operations at a Minneapolis architecture firm. Is there anything Charles Carlson doesn’t do?

Um, tell the truth? From the Daily’s investigation into his background:

Just days before DFL caucusing begins for Minneapolis City Council elections, Charles Carlson — University of Minnesota student and Minnesota representative at the Democratic National Convention — said he will announce Monday his withdrawal from the Ward 2 council member race following a series of lies regarding his past and his qualifications.
An investigation by The Minnesota Daily found that Carlson lied on several occasions concerning items such as his college education at Princeton University and where he grew up.
Carlson, who speaks with an English accent, previously claimed he grew up in Ramsgate, England, but admitted recently that he grew up in the United States.
The Daily confirmed that Carlson attended elementary school, middle schools and high schools throughout Minnesota, including Northfield High School, where a former classmate said Carlson did not have an accent. Also, the classmate did not have any knowledge of Carlson previously living in England.
In a Feb. 1 Daily article, Carlson said his English background would help him connect with the 2nd Ward’s immigrant population.
Carlson also provided the Daily with two fraudulent transcripts to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and Princeton University. These schools, along with two other English schools he claimed to have attended, had no record of Carlson.
Carlson said he has been diagnosed with schizophrenia affective disorder, which impacts an individual’s ability to accurately judge reality…

In the Jan. 25 issue of the Magazine, we ran an essay in the XX Files headlined “Suspended Disbelief.” The author was writing about the dilemma she felt when a friend’s husband was sent to jail for molesting a young girl, despite his protestations of innocence. In the end, she discovered that even though she wanted to believe her friend’s husband, she couldn’t quite do it.
The column had factual errors, and editors in the Magazine, including me, failed to catch them. The author wrote that the man had been talked into accepting a plea agreement, and implied that there had been only one accuser. In fact, the man had turned down the plea offer, and had been tried and convicted. Also, more than one girl made accusations. The inescapable conclusion is that the man’s guilt was not as ambiguous as presented. No names were used, but the families of the victims only too readily recognized the circumstances and were understandably upset by the implication of the story. Today, I want to apologize for our errors and publish a letter from a victim’s grandmother …

The magazine also felt the need to publish an Editor’s Note to apologize in advance for a column, headline and illustration in this week’s issue:

The headline, illustration and text of “Below the Beltway,” a column in The Washington Post Magazine today, may cause offense to readers. The magazine was printed before a widely publicized incident last week in which a chimpanzee attacked and badly mauled a woman in Stamford, Conn. In addition, the image and text inadvertently may conjure racial stereotypes that The Post does not countenance. We regret the lapse.

The column, which is written by Pulitzer winner Gene Weingarten, is online here.  This is the illustration:

The online version of the column doesn’t include the Note. Finally, the paper published this Editor’s Note:

A Feb. 19 Page One article disclosed an FBI investigation into the personal life of the late Jack Valenti, former White House aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson. The piece should have stated more expressly than it did that the investigation produced no evidence that Valenti was gay or had a sexual relationship with a photographer who was mentioned in FBI records but whose name was redacted from those files. The motivation for the investigation is not clear from the files provided by the FBI. In addition, The Post should have made clear that it contacted Valenti’s immediate family before the piece was published. After considering the matter, they requested that no statement from the family be included in the article. The Post should have indicated that the family knew of and was given an opportunity to address the facts presented in the article.

Thanks, G!

UPDATE Feb. 23: The Washington City Paper received a comment from Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli about the cartoon Editor’s Note:

The decision to run Editor’s Notes at major dailies doesn’t rest with the paper’s lower rungs. This is an executive editor’s prerogative, and Marcus Brauchli, who holds that title at the Post, says there are two reasons for the note.
No. 1: “[T]he magazine had gone to press before the incident in Connecticut. We wanted readers to understand that, so they wouldn’t think us callous in our choice of words and images.”
OK, unnecessary but understandable. But what about the racial part?
Here’s Brauchli on that: “[S]ome people in our newsroom thought the illustration and some language in the article was potentially problematic. We debated internally whether the illustration or the piece could be interpreted by anyone, even in a stretch, as racially insensitive. We concluded, regretfully, that such an interpretation might be made, and we wanted to let readers know that The Post neither intended nor tolerates the use of racial stereotypes.”

This Editor’s Note was written about by the Washington City Paper, and the resulting story includes the text of an email sent by the owner of the Commissary. It’s notable for this passage (emphasis added):

We challenged Mr. Sietsema on his grievously negative assertions, his lack of disclosure and the simple fact that the article should never have been written. We insisted that recusing himself was the only proper and ethical thing to have done. He apologized for not recusing himself, nothing more.

All this was then turned over to his editor, Tom Shroder of The Washington Post Magazine. Mr. Shroder, understanding the ramifications of Mr. Sietsema’s actions offered a settlement; kill the story on the web immediately, print a retraction in Sunday’s paper, and that neither Mr. Sietsema nor any member of The Washington Post food team would ever write about any Eatwell DC restaurant again. What they would not do is apologize for the harm caused by Sietsema’s spurious comments. “The Washington Post doesn’t apologize” but “we will say we regret”.

Thanks, Greg!