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For its size, St. Louis has a large number of publications dedicated entirely or in part to food journalism. While all that coverage is, in theory, good for St. Louis area chefs, restaurants, and food-related businesses, the competition among publications can produce questionable ethical practices, and social media makes the competition even fiercer as publications attempt to be the first to break a story.
When considering trends in food journalism, questions surrounding attribution, criticism, and objectivity arise. In the changing world of new media, what’s considered intellectual property? What conflicts of interest arise when a writer or editor befriends a subject? If one publication breaks a story, should another publication reporting on the same news give credit to the first publication? When a publication owns the rights to works (and generally they do, although not outside of the US), can its editorial staff use a writer’s language and ideas from an old article in a new one without giving him or her credit? We don’t pretend to have all the answers but thought that we’d start a conversation here surrounding journalism and ethics.
Plagiarism—the lack of attribution—is usually associated with education. In academic settings, many agree on what should be attributed (others’ ideas and language) compared to what’s considered common knowledge and needs no citation. Even on college campuses, however, there is disagreement about what exactly plagiarism is and how to deal with it (most universities have academic honesty policies but balk at releasing hard-and-fast rules about consequences for fear of lawsuits).
The worlds of journalism and academia are different, to be sure. David Simon, a former reporter for The Baltimore Sun and creator of The Wire, claims that one can’t compare the two worlds when it comes to plagiarism, in his essay “Michael Olesker Is a Plagiarist. Who Isn’t?”: “Journalism is not scholarship. While reporting requires integrity and precision, it is not a world of footnotes, textual cites, and bibliographic acknowledgment, and the news report of any major daily is a communal property.”
I’m not going to argue with Simon; the man created one of the best, if not the best TV series ever, after all. But if I had used his quote without acknowledging his name, placing it in quotation marks, and adding a hyperlink to the original article, I would be a plagiarist. To be fair, most people would agree with me about the example I just gave. It’s other areas in journalism that fall into a grey area—if information comes from the AP Wire, for instance, or has become part of the public domain through wide dispersal. And then there are photos, videos, illustrations, and graphics. In a college classroom, I would say all intellectual property not your own must be cited; in the pages of newspapers and in online publications, unfortunately, the rules are less defined and easier to “break.”
What if information comes from a press release? Is it okay for an editor to take a press release, either excerpts or the whole thing, and publish it without attribution? Does it matter if the attached byline reads “by,” which suggests a journalist wrote it, or “posted by,” which gives an implicit nod towards the original writer? The practice of journalists using press releases as their own has become so widespread, a new word has been coined to describe it: “churnalism.” And, like the services that universities subscribe to that detect plagiarism in students’ essays, there is a churnalism tool, churnalism.com, that helps catch offending journalists.
One problem is that journalists themselves can’t agree on whether or not churnalism is unethical even if publications like the New York Times have guidelines on ethical practices. According to Norman P. Lewis in his 2008 article, “Plagiarism Antecedents and Situational Influences,” published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, “Plagiarism’s hard-to-demarcate nature and journalism’s aversion to attribution produce definitional ambiguity.” What David Simon says isn’t plagiarism another journalist would argue is, and therein lies the problem.
Lewis returned to the subject in 2012 in the article, “The Root of Journalistic Plagiarism: Contested Attribution Beliefs,” co-authored with Bu Zhong, also published in J&MC Quarterly. A group of professional journalists was surveyed, with 953 responding, about various beliefs surrounding attribution. Regarding whether or not press releases should be attributed, “about a fourth of respondents rejected the prescriptive ideal that good journalism required the attribution of all sources, and the most significant exception regarded press releases.”
Moreover, the authors found that age may influence beliefs, with more experienced journalists less likely to endorse using a press release without attribution. Lewis and Zhong also note that “the reluctance to attribute press releases may [ . . .] reflect a desire to perpetuate a ‘pretense of originality’ and hide journalism’s derivative nature, if not contempt for public relations as a field.”
How do those in PR feel about journalists using their releases without attribution? If one believes Gerard Corbett, the chair and CEO of the Public Relations Society of America, attribution is best, but since one of the goals of press releases is to reach the public, a PR professional will often overlook a lack of attribution, “given the benefits that accrue to their companies or clients as a result.” Scrolling through the comment section of this article about press releases and plagiarism reveals more than one commenter in PR saying releases are created with the PR writer’s “blessing” to be used without credit.
Some still argue, however, that press releases should be attributed, and better yet, the writer should simply use them as a starting point for an article. In NPR’s code of ethics, a particularly important point is made regarding press releases: “We must take into account that press releases and other handout materials (such as images) from organizations we cover are usually delivered with the intent of portraying the subject in the best possible light.”
It seems, then, that if one uses a press release—an advertisement—without attributing the original author, he or she might think more carefully about what bias lies behind the release itself and whether or not the publication wants to adopt such bias. At one end of the spectrum, a writer or editor might appear to be lazy or biased when copying a press release without attribution, but at the other end rest journalists like Steve Penn, who was fired from The Kansas City Star for using press releases in his column without giving credit to the original authors. How does Penn compare to more (in)famous journalists such as Jonah Lehrer, Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, and Mike Barnicle, all of whom were accused of plagiarism?
More to the point for St. Louis, what can area publications do to promote honesty in covering the food scene? When in doubt, perhaps it’s best to follow the Association of Food Journalists’ Code of Ethics: “Food journalists should use their bylines only in conjunction with material they have produced. Food journalists should not attach their names to reprinted press releases or articles provided by publicists.”
Editor's Note: The second part of Agnew's series--a discussion of journalistic objectivity, favoritism, and bias--will be published in this space next week.
