Rational Action

Astute readers will remember a certain angry post I made a few months back. Basically, I had written an Op-Ed piece and gotten it published in the Columbia Spectator. The piece crticized the controversial film Columbia Unbecoming. The next day the newspaper had run a correction, claiming that because I had posted a similar version of the piece on my blog, the material had been “previously published” — an act that strictly violated Spectator guidelines.

Since I had first shown the article to the Spectator editors by giving them a link to the blog, I figured that they had simply forgotten to tell me of the policy. After they ran the piece, I received an e-mail explaining the Spectator reprinting policy — but not a notification that a correction would run the following day. I supposed that the editor who originally saw the draft had simply told some pedantic higher-up who didn’t want this mistake to happen again. I then shrugged my shoulders and moved on to the next message in my Inbox.

The next day Spectator ran the correction, and when I saw it, I was pissed. I immediately wrote a pretty scathing e-mail. However, after weighing the costs and benefits of fighting with the very people I needed to get my opinions in print, I closed the e-mail without sending it. So began the healing process. That was that… until now.

It seems that there is a student a Columbia who has a clear agenda with respect to MEALAC, but, having been kicked off the Spectator, lacks a public means of articulating his opinions. He runs a blog where he complains about bias in MEALAC and the Spectator, but unlike most campus media critics, he has valiantly decided to correct that bias by any means possible. To refute my piece, he turned to academia’s greatest embarassment: plagiarism.

This fellow, who goes by the name of Ariel Beery, sent a letter to the Spectator with these choice words:

What I do think you should be worried about, however, is plagiarism. The article you ran by Adam Sacarny was, in large parts, previously printed, which can also be found here (and added in the extended entry below in case he erases it). It doesn’t matter that the author of the two was the same person — just like you have to cite your previous work when you write a paper, a newspaper has to fully disclose when an article was previously printed, in whole or in part. What you published, then, can be considered by Columbia’s code of ethics “plagiarism.”

I had considered many kinds of challenges to my article and had considered logical responses for all of them, but I never thought that someone would try to discredit my argument without responding to its points at all! Thankfully, Spectator kept my article on their website, and they didn’t bother to sully it with the correction. I’m glad they don’t seem to have fully accepted Beery’s attack, because there’s an important question that I wish Beery and the Spectator editors had considered: does making a blog post equal publication?

You might be surprised to know that I think Beery’s on to something. If people beyond my inner circle of friends actively read the blog, if I had posted the article as a final copy and not as a first draft, and if I had attempted to conceal its presence on the blog from the Spectator’s editors, then yes, it would be reasonable to call my actions plagiarism. However, I posted the article on the blog so that my friends could review it: placing it on an easily accessible and reloadable site allowed me to show them my changes without sending e-mails back and forth. I stopped updating the online copy once the editors explained that they wanted to see the changes in word format — further evidence that it was only posted for review. Finally, when I first showed the article to the editor, I did so by giving him the address of my blog. He entered the address into the web browser and read the draft to an editor-in-training, criticizing it without warning me that what I was doing amounted to plagiarism.

Blogs are a new medium, and they can certainly be publications. At the same time, making a blog post is usually not tantamount to getting your piece in a newspaper, magazine, or nearly any other print media. For me, the article was on my blog not for publication, but for peer review. Beery should have contacted me and clarified the issue before sending his letter. Since he blogs too, the communication could have resulted in an interesting online debate about MEALAC — one which would have informed many people about the controversy. So why did Beery pass up this opportunity? I can only speculate, but it seems that he would prefer to silence unsavory views, rather than contribute to an open dialogue about them. Strangely enough, balanced discussions were just what Columbia Unbecoming supposedly sought to encourage. Since Beery doesn’t seem to have learned from the film, maybe we should consider his actions as more proof of its failure to convince.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 11th, 2005 at 4:09 am and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.