8 Plagiarism and Fabrication
As an opening for our lesson on plagiarism and fabrication, let’s look at a couple of cartoons.
Study the following presentation slides by using the forward button or clicking on sections of the control bar.
In his book The Ethical Journalist, Gene Foreman provides useful definitions for plagiarism and fabrication.
- Fabrication can be defined as “making things up and passing them off as genuine.”
- Plagiarism involves “taking credit for phrases, sentences, paragraphs, or even an entire story” even though someone else created it.
Fabrication and Plagiarism – Pure and Simple
Former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was the key figure in one of the nation’s most famous fabrication and plagiarism cases. Blair often reported as if he had been on the scene when he wrote the stories from his apartment, sometimes inventing narratives and other times stealing information from already published works.
For historical perspective and to understand Blair’s motivation for plagiarism and fabrication, watch the following two videos:
1. Documentary Film Trailer for “A Fragile Trust,” which chronicled Jayson Blair’s story.
2. Jayson Blair: “Slippery-Slope” To Fabricating Stories | Oprah Winfrey Network
Blair resigned from the New York Times in 2003. Since then, journalists have increasingly relied upon websites, online search engines and social media platforms as fact-checking tools, but that hasn’t squashed all instances of plagiarism and fabrication.
For example, in 2022 editors from USA Today removed stories written by Gabriela Miranda. An audit of Miranda’s work revealed that “some individuals quoted were not affiliated with the organizations claimed and appeared to be fabricated,” while “some stories included quotes that should have been credited to others.”
• USA TODAY removed 23 stories from website, other platforms following audit of reporter’s work – USA Today
As shown in the screenshot below, when readers clicked on a link for an affected story on the USA Today website, they saw only an editor’s note stating that the story had been removed.
Plagiarism and Politics
In 2016, President Donald Trump initially named conservative author and TV personality Monica Crowley to be senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council. Shortly thereafter, however, multiple news outlets reported that Crowley had plagiarized large portions of her book What the (Bleep) Just Happened, previously published in 2012.
The Trump administration at first stood by Crowley and her best-selling book but later reversed course. A CNN Money story, published in 2017 but no longer publicly available, listed approximately 60 instances of alleged plagiarism. It included each quote from Crowley’s book side by side with the original source. This side-by-side comparison – which is rarely done within an article – made this incident convenient for our examination. Crowley contended the criticism of her work was “a political hit job.”
Below is a screenshot from a portion of CNN Money’ s side-by-side comparison.
Although Crowley’s publisher suspended sales of her book due to plagiarism, Crowley labeled the CNN Money story as a political hit job. Read more about her reaction from Salon:
Fabrication and Politics
News editors should never assume that the content of a story is true without consulting multiple sources to verify key information. That seems simple and obvious, but occasionally the lure of a juicy political story triumphs over ethical fact-checking. As a result, fabricated stories are published.
A 2021 story in the New York Post reported that, as part of a welcome kit, migrant children had been given copies of a children’s book written by Kamala Harris, who was vice president at the time. The story was fabricated, but that didn’t stop the false narrative from spreading on social media. You can read the New York Times’ summary of the incident:
• New York Post reporter who wrote false Kamala Harris story resigns – NY Times
(University of Arkansas students have free access to the NY Times by signing up via campus email credentials)
Similarly, false stories and commentaries circulated in 2021, saying that the Biden administration wanted to dramatically limit the consumption of red meat in the United States to as little as one hamburger per month per person. A PBS video explained how the fabrication spread and clarified a misleading connection to a university research project.
Of course, misinformation comes from both ends of the political spectrum. Leading up to the 2024 presidential election, a New York Times article reported that “left-wing misinformation is having a moment.” The social media deception included posts claiming, without evidence, that President Trump may have staged an assassination attempt.
Plagiarism and Public Relations
PR professionals regularly send out news releases hoping that they will be published in news media outlets. But if a company’s PR news release is published word-for-word on a local news website, what should the byline say? Read the following analysis from the Plagiarism Today website:
• The problem with press release plagiarism – Plagiarism Today
The analysis included this observation about situations in which news organizations do not divulge that a published story originated from a press release:
… if a person offers up their work to be plagiarized, plagiarism appears to be a victimless crime. However, the plagiarized party is not the only victim. Plagiarism, at its most fundamental level, is a lie. It’s a person saying that they wrote or created something that they did not. That lie, however, isn’t told to the plagiarized party, but to the audience.
Fabrication and Sports
In an episode of the Pardon My Take podcast from Barstool Sports, Fox sports reporter Charissa Thompson said that earlier in her career she had invented quotes from coaches in her sideline reports.
“I would make up the reports sometimes, because the coach wouldn’t come out at halftime, or it was too late and I didn’t want to screw up the report.”
Thompson faced immediate backlash from other professional sports journalists. On the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), ESPN sideline reporter Molly McGrath posted the following:
“Young reporters: This is not normal or ethical. Coaches and players trust us with sensitive information, and if they know that you’re dishonest and don’t take your role seriously, you’ve lost all trust and credibility.”
And Kevin Smith, a board member of the Society of Professional Journalists, was even more critical in a response to The Washington Post.
“This is just appallingly bad journalism to engage in, and to brag about it and defend it as harmless is beyond the pale. The SPJ’s ethics code addresses truth, harm, independence and accountability. She gets the trifecta for destroying three ethical tenets with her lying.”
One could argue that Thompson did not report truthfully, harmed her profession, and did not take accountability for her actions.
Fabrication in AI Content
In the field of philosophy, the term bullshit isn’t necessarily a questionable word choice. It’s also an academic term initially put forth by Princeton professor Harry Frankfurt, who wrote an influential book titled On Bullshit.
Three researchers at the University of Glasgow in Scotland took Frankfurt’s work a step further to argue that large language models such as ChatGPT can be considered bullshit machines. Their research essay was titled “ChatGPT Is Bullshit.”
In the audio below, one of the co-authors, James Humphries, explained the difference between soft bullshit and hard bullshit based on the potential motives of large language models and, by extension, those who design and use them for gain in professional media environments.
As a follow-up, co-author Michael Townsen Hicks provided advice to media professionals about using metaphors to describe large language models.
Plagiarism and AI
More recently, AI usage has led to plagiarism accusations in news media. Here are two contributing factors:
- Large-language models such as ChatGPT make errors when citing sources or simply do not include sources used to generate some responses.
- News outlets publish AI-generated content without effective guardrails for ensuring that original sources receive credit for original reporting.
For example, Futurism reported that Sports Illustrated deleted every article by one of its writers after some journalists complained that Sports Illustrated was using AI to publish plagiarized content. Sportico editor Dan Bernstein was among those who said his work had been plagiarized by Sports Illustrated, and he became frustrated that the plagiarized content was getting a wider audience than his original reporting. Bernstein gave the following quote:
“If someone was plagiarizing my work and no one was actually seeing it, then it would be semi-annoying, But the idea of a plagiarized version showing up in Google over my own version, or someone seeing the plagiarized version and then citing the plagiarized version instead of my own, that’s kind of frustrating.”
The Allure of ‘Fake News’
Fabricated stories have surfaced throughout the history of U.S. journalism, no matter if the false information was spread via a printed newspaper article or a TikTok video.
People who claim that a story is “fake news” are suggesting that content has been fabricated. Research shows that our minds retain fabricated content because it is novel or outlandish, and because it arouses emotional impact. Read this research summary from Harvard’s Nieman Lab.
• The neuroscience of how fake news grabs our attention, produces false memories, and appeals to our emotions – Harvard’s Nieman Lab
A key takeaway from the article focused on emotional appeal:
The ability of fake news to grab our attention and then highjack our learning and memory circuitry goes a long way to explaining its success. But its strongest selling point is its ability to appeal to our emotions.
Image Manipulation as Fabrication
It’s not just text that can be fabricated. In some instances, photo or video manipulation can be a form of fabrication. If you skim through examples at the following link, you’ll see examples of photo manipulation that came more than a century before the advent of Photoshop and digital tools for image editing.
• Photo tampering throughout history (Georgia Tech College of Computing)
In the age of AI-generated visuals, verification of visual images has become increasingly complex and time-consuming, so that even the world’s leading deepfake expert no longer trusts his own eyes. You can test your ability to recognize manipulated images by taking the following online quiz.
• A.I. is getting better fast. Can you tell what’s real now? – NY Times
(University of Arkansas students have free access to the NY Times by signing up via campus email credentials)
Finally, the video below from Today explained how the technology of AI-generated video has advanced and included tips on how to recognized deepfakes.
Writing for the Society of Professional Journalists, Rod Hicks stressed that, because of AI technology, editors must now verify all photo and video submissions to avoid spreading misinformation.
Every photo and video organizations receive – from politicians, corporations, public relations practitioners, foreign governments, activists or just regular folks – is an opportunity to misinform the public.
Closing Review
Write About It
Answer each question in approximately five sentences. When possible, strengthen your responses with brief supporting content from this chapter.
- Do you think the chapter’s examples about Monica Crowley meet the definition of plagiarism? Are you sympathetic to her view that she is the victim of a political hit job? Explain the reasons for your conclusion.
- Revisit the linked content about photo tampering throughout history. Find an example of photo tampering that you think fits the description of fabrication discussed in this chapter. Include the year and a brief summary of the case, and then tell why you think this example is particularly egregious.
- Based on audio content in this chapter, why is the philosophical term bullshit an appropriate metaphor for some text generated by large language models such as ChatGPT?
- Briefly describe a personal example of an encounter with fabricated content in your media consumption. Provide details about the context and motivation for the fabricated content, and share whether you immediately recognized the deception.
- Let’s pretend you are a PR writer for a research foundation. You have been asked to ghostwrite a story about a 90-year old donor who has begun to show signs of dementia. You have studied several decades of news articles about the donor, but you suspect the anecdotes that the donor shares with you today may not be entirely accurate. Do you feel comfortable with this ghostwriting assignment? How should you proceed?
- How concerned are you about the trend of large-language models plagiarizing content from published works? Do you think this is just a disruptive technology that media professionals will grow accustomed to, or are there larger ethical concerns? (NOTE – for assignments in this OER text, I highly discourage your from outsourcing your thinking and decision-making to AI. For this particular question, it would be depressingly ironic. Please don’t!)
