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As someone who has written about plagiarism for more than 20 years, I think it may be time to re-think the word.  Because the p-word is the scarlet letter of the literary world, because it is associated with a rogues gallery of writers and reporters, it  should be reserved, in my opinion, for the most serious cases of malpractice.

To use the term to cover too many sins may be a kind of ethical problem unto itself.  You can be called a lazy or sloppy reporter and recover. To be called a plagiarist, and fired for it, has a deeper meaning and darker consequences.  In some cases, including the one involving Professor Emeritus John C. Merrill of Missouri, editors may be using a sledgehammer to smash a spider.

As for consequences, consider what happened when I Googled the name John C. Merrill.  I got more than 2-million results.  The first 10 links created a picture of Professor Merrill as a distinguished servant of scholarship, academic leadership and the practice of journalism, in a career that spanned more than a half-century.

But when I Googled "Professor Merrill, Missouri," I got about 400,000 links. Of the first 10, nine, including one to Poynter's Romenesko, touched on the plagiarism controversy.  The first link was to a Fox News report -- WHICH I AM QUOTING NOW:


The same article goes on to quote Tom Warhover, editor of the Columbia Missourian: "Missourian policy does not allow any writer to appropriate someone else's words as his own, even when those words are within quotation marks," he said.  

   

RELATED

More on the issue from Roy Peter Clark: * "Reverse Plagiarism"?  Or, "Did I Say That?"

As for Merrill, he wrote a letter apologizing for careless work and unintended plagiarism -- which I'm not sure is even possible -- but later seemed to protest that he had done nothing wrong. So we may have a case here where even a famous journalism professor and a fine newspaper editor are confused about what constitutes plagiarism. Join the club, boys, I'm right there with ya.

I've studied Merrill's column and the student story from which he appropriated quotes. There are two things I do not like about his column:

1. He should have dropped a quick attribution into the column ("as reported in The Maneater").  I'm not suggesting that not doing so was an ethical lapse, only that doing so would have shown respect to the student and the publication.
   
2. The column itself was a dinosaur cliché, the easiest kind of attack by a cranky old prof against the political correctness of gender studies.  But that's not unethical either.

Other supporters of Merrill have expressed their disdain for the scrupulous standards that sent him packing from his writing gig.  They have reminded us all that the question of how and when to borrow quotes for a column or editorial is not a settled issue, and probably never will be.  Warhover has every right to develop standards for his staff that are tight to the point of strangulation. He can be the king of hyper-ethics if he wants to.  But he has no more right to call Merrill's actions plagiarism, than a prosecutor has the right to refer to reckless endangerment as murder in the first degree.

The law sees a need for distinctions to which ethics  is sometimes blind.  And it's the rare day when I argue that it's time for ethics to catch up with the law.

Perhaps a definition of terms would be helpful.  I've argued in the past that there are three distinctive categories for judging the actions of journalists: morality, ethics, and standards and practices.  Morality is about right and wrong, the kind of judgment the average person might make without training:  It is wrong for the bank teller to steal money from the till.  Ethics is less about right and wrong, and more about what is the better good or the lesser evil.  In journalism, standards and practices are articulations of reasonable behaviors the members of a group agree to follow.

I continue to think, for example, that it was a terrible injustice to lump the cases of Rick Bragg and Jayson Blair together, even though controversies about their work cropped up at about the same time.  Blair's transgressions were almost pathologically immoral.  The debate over Bragg's work was much more about standards and practices, such as the meaning of datelines and how to credit the work of stringers.

From the reports I've seen, I would argue that Merrill was in the practice of borrowing reported quotes for use in his opinion columns, and that he, despite his apologies, did not think there was anything wrong with such a practice.  I hope Warhover's "higher standard" includes a direct prohibition of that specific activity, and that such a prohibition is communicated to everyone who writes for the paper.  By no definition I have ever seen would such behavior constitute plagiarism.

It is a far greater ethical transgression, I believe, to create a consequence -- excommunication and  humiliation --  out of all proportion to the violation.  If it were up to me, I would have printed a clarification, attributing the quotes to the student reporter.  I would have called Merrill and informed him that using quotes that way, even in an opinion column, violates the standards of the Missourian, and that if he did not want to adhere to such standards, he should pitch his column somewhere else.

What we are left with instead is a stain on a scholar whose work over decades has been judged original, and a good editor who looks more than a little like those Puritans who pinned a scarlet "A" on ladies suspected of adultery.