Regret the Error

While preparing a column this week, Slate’s Jack Shafer stumbled upon an incident of plagiarism at the New York Times. Shafer wrote a column about the theft and the Times has now responded with an Editor’s Note:

A front-page article on Saturday described a cocaine epidemic in Argentina fed by the consumption of paco, an addictive smokable cocaine residue. The article included an explanatory paragraph about paco’s addictive power and toxicity that repeated material from a 2006 article published in The Miami Herald, without attributing it to the newspaper. The correspondent, who had done his own research with Argentine and Brazilian officials on the drug and its effects, should have summarized it in his own words, or credited The Herald.
The passage in question is this:
“Paco is highly addictive because its high lasts just a few minutes—and is so intense that many users smoke 20 to 50 paco cigarettes a day to try to make its effects linger. Paco is even more toxic than crack cocaine because it is made mostly of solvents and chemicals like kerosene, with just a dab of cocaine, Argentine and Brazilian drug enforcement officials said.”

Times Managing Editor Jill Abramson told Shafer that, “I think when you take material almost word-for-word and don’t credit it, it is [plagiarism].” Abramson declined to detail if Alexei Barrionuevo, the writer, will face discipline. The Times has a policy of not talking publicly about personnel issues, which Shafer notes is common at many organizations. But does this mean the public won’t know whether or not the paper decided to review Barrionuevo’s previous work, something that should be standard practice after any incident of plagiarism?

Hopefully the Public Editor will investigate how the paper is handling the issue. At this point, the lack of information leaves Barrionuevo open to speculation about his previous work for the paper. It’s one thing to keep the specific discipline an internal matter. But the post-Blair era requires a paper to be transparent about how it handles an incident of plagiarism. As of now, readers know nothing about how the paper treats such a serious offense.