Plagiarism is a hugely impactful lesson to be taught and learned in journalism. If a journalist plagiarizes something, it is likely the end of his or her career. Pullman reiterates this idea and applies it to all areas of the workforce or academia, saying “if you make a habit of cheating and passing off other people’s work as your own, people will see you for the fraud you are, and you won’t get a job, or they won’t notice right away, and you will spend a few miserable months cowering in a cubicle until someone does notice you can’t do the work and fires you on the spot.” A real-life example of this is Stephen Glass, a journalist in the 90s was exposed for writing articles that were basically all made up – events he wrote about, conversations he’d referenced, they were all fake. It was not discovered for years until one minor fact exposed his whole bed of lies. His plagiarism was so outrageous, a movie called Shattered Glass, was made about his career and its ultimate downfall. Side note – it’s a serious toss-up between Shattered Glass and Hotel Rwanda for the movie most shown in classes throughout my academic career.
Now not every case of plagiarism is as blatant as Stephen Glass. I think plagiarism is so widely talked about because it’s so easy to do. It takes integrity and true intellectual effort to craft your own writings and make sure other’s work is properly attributed. It is easy to forget a quotation mark here or an in-text citation there. However, if you do slip up with something like this, it can undermine the whole work. For example, if I was writing a persuasive paper, and I forgot to put quotations around something one of my sources said, it looks as if I am trying to deceive my audience into believing I said that. This could discount my authority with my audience altogether, and lead to them shutting me out completely.
A little later in the book Pullman talks about plagiarism in the context of art. He references T.S. Eliot and his writings relating to plagiarism and poetry. Eliot writes, “One of the surest tests [ of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”
Poetry is much like song-writing, and I think this quote is very much applicable to the art of making music today. There are a plethora of artists preceding those creating music today, so it makes it difficult to craft something totally unique. Following Eliot’s form, an immature songwriter imitates. For example, it seemed like all the music of 2016 featured a dancehall beat. This style of music comes from the islands, and Rihanna and Drake were some of the first artists to make it popular in 2016. Following their success, however, other artists like Justin Beiber, Shawn Mendes and a slew of DJs released music with dancehall beats too. Where Rihanna and Drake had transformed the island sound into a hip-hop success, other artists immediately after them were just imitating the already Americanized sound. Even more obvious was Fifth Harmony’s Work from Home song which featured a hook almost identical to Rihanna’s song Work.
Going back to Eliot, he says a good poet makes what they’ve borrowed into something better. This reminded me of sampling in music, where a sample from another song is layered into a new song. Kanye West and other rappers do this often. For example, Kanye’s early-aughts single Gold Digger sampled Ray Charles’ song I Got a Woman. I would say this was a successful transformation of taking another artist’s work and making it into something different, if not arguably better.
A more recent and less successful example of this, in my opinion, is DJ Khaled’s Wild Thoughts featuring Rihanna and Bryson Tiller. This song sampled Santanna’s Maria, Maria. Personally, I felt like this song trashed Santanna’s original.
Sampling is not plagiarism, but rather a modern tactic to avoid plagiarism and do just as Eliot said – make something better or different. However, as shown above, sometimes it works and other times it doesn’t.
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