Rieder: Another outbreak of plagiarism

Talleyrand, the noted French statesman and diplomat, died in 1838, well before the advent of the Internet era. But his aphorism is as useful now as it was then.

"This is worse than a crime," he famously said, "it's a blunder."

We are in the midst of one of those periodic clusters of plagiarism cases. BuzzFeed fires a writer for serial plagiarism. A veteran New York Times reporter uses material from Wikipedia without attribution. And U.S. Sen. John Walsh, D-Mont., is discovered to have borrowed work from elsewhere for his master's thesis.

That plagiarism is morally wrong is beyond argument. It's theft. But beyond that, it's just so stupid.

There always has been the risk of getting caught, even back in Talleyrand's day. But in the Internet era, the odds have increased astronomically. Your audience is worldwide. Someone is likely to notice. The Internet culture is packed with citizen media critics, and they are likely to track you down, which is exactly what happened in the BuzzFeed saga.

The flip side, of course, is that the Internet makes plagiarism so easy. Encountering writer's block? An infinite array of material is just a cut and a paste away. You don't even have to spend any energy writing down or typing all those words.

But what a price you will pay.

The BuzzFeed case dramatizes how Web detectives can bring you down. It also illustrates the danger of taunting.

Benny Johnson, BuzzFeed's viral politics editor (now there's a title), brought on his own demise when he accused another website, the Independent Journal Review, of stealing his stuff. The matter in question involved an item about former president George H.W. Bush's eye-catching red and white socks. (I know.)

That inspired two anonymous Twitter users to look into Johnson's work, they told Talking Points Memo in an e-mail interview. But they also were motivated by concerns about how BuzzFeed does business. They created a blog and published their findings about Johnson, which were quite damning. Soon Johnson was gone.

BuzzFeed has attracted huge amounts of traffic with its preternatural ability to create endless streams of viral content. Some of it is clever; some if it is silly; some of it is sleazy. As I write this, it is featuring such fare as "19 Women Reveal Their Most Cringe-Worthy Sexual Experiences" and "Look At This Pit Bull Princess and Have A More Fabulous Day."

But as BuzzFeed has evolved, it has also embraced serious newsgathering, covering national politics, establishing foreign bureaus and launching an investigative reporting unit. To his credit, after initially seeming to downplay the situation, Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith did the right thing. Following a BuzzFeed investigation of Johnson's handiwork, which found 41 instances of copying material from others, Smith dispatched the reporter. The site's forays into serious news made it incumbent on the organization to take journalistic standards seriously, Smith said. And he's right.

Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten, an exceptionally smart fellow, has downplayed the significance of the BuzzFeed blunders because of the low-level, low-rent nature of much of the pilfered material. He dismisses the episode as "a pathetic little phony scandal." But Weingarten is wrong here. Larceny is larceny, regardless of the nature of the stolen goods.

Dylan Byers of Politicosuggested that one cause of the BuzzFeed fiasco was the fact that the site has many staffers who are not trained journalists. But over the years many news outlets and journalists with superb pedigrees have been hit with plagiarism charges, as the current New York Times case reminds us. (USA TODAY was caught up in a major plagiarism scandal involving discredited reporter Jack Kelley in 2004.)

In the current situation, FishbowlNY, following up on information from a tipster, reported that the Times' Carol Vogel had borrowed heavily from Wikipedia in the first paragraph of her article about Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo. In an Editors' Note Wednesday, the Timessaid the paragraph "improperly used specific language and details from a Wikipedia article without attribution; it should not have been published in that form."

Perhaps the most creative plagiarism defense of all time came from Sen. Walsh, who originally said that post-traumatic stress disorder may have induced him to steal material for his master's thesis from the United States Army War College. Which brings to mind another Talleyrand mot: "If we go on explaining, we shall cease to understand one another."