This post (which links to the actual story, which I suppose I could have done, but didn't, and the post is probably more entertaining anyway) got me thinking about how hypersensitive our plagiarism triggers have gotten of late.
Attribution is a tricky subject. Interestingly, this morning, I got myself all knotty over the fact that I'd not been given what I considered "proper" credit for something I'd written. Several weeks ago, a partner had wanted an outline, basically, of one of the areas of law we practice to use in a marketing packet, and asked me to research it and put it together. Since I don't so much do that sort of work anymore, it took quite a long time to pull together all the cases and then to digest them for laypeople (is it more properly "laypersons" or is that just a taste thing?), and it ended up taking about ten hours for a final precis about fifteen pages long. I gave it to the partner, with the firm's name, of course, plastered prominently all over it, and with his name above mine as the creater of the document (which I actually thought was fairly big of me, even though entirely appropriate given the hierarchy -- yeah, I'm not so good with the "authority" thing). This morning, the partner sent over about nine new cases in that area and asked I add them to the outline -- so I pulled the outline up and promptly had a rage blackout -- my name was nowhere to be found, and the partner had plastered his name, alone, across every page of the thing. Now, I don't debate his right to put his name on the document -- he, of course, is the partner, I am the associate, and I can't expect to get sole credit for a big piece of our advertising (although I was the only person who wrote and researched the thing, he didn't change anything). But I sorely resent the fact that he's holding himself out as the sole creator of my hard work. (Yeah, I'd never make it in BigLaw, would I?). I think it's only right and proper that if I put all the work into producing something, I should get some credit, somewhere.
On the other hand, my reaction to the story about the dismissal of the Daily Princetonian columnist for alleged plagiarism was to think "how ridiculous." I suppose I think plagiarism allegations, particularly in journalism, should be taken with perhaps a few more grains of salt. More information is reviewed more often by more outlets/persons than ever before, and instead of crying plagiarism every time two of those persons says the same thing about the same topic, perhaps we should first recognize that there are simply not enough different perspectives on the same topic to provide new and original material for the insanely exploding numbers of media outlets. And beyond that, it's always been a commonplace that anything worth saying has already been said -- the difference now is that, with the wide availability of all of those statements on the Internet, more people read more of them and so are more easily able to find those which are the same or similar. Now, yes, I will agree (having once been a college student myself), that there are certainly instances of hard-core plagiarism, in which you simultaneously read a passage and let your fingers scurry over your keyboard typing it into your term paper or what have you. But then, there are those circumstances in which you, in the process of researching your term paper, read four or five sources and come to a conclusion from them, which you write into your term paper in a small section, and then later discover that one (and if it's only one, I'd be shocked) of the other bajillion college students in the country also came to the same conclusion, in the same way, relying on the same sources and included it as a similar small section in a paper on a slightly different topic. (And before you tell me this is a ridiculous hypothetical, it's not -- with permission, it's borrowed from the life of a very close friend, except that in her case, it was her senior thesis and the "similar work" was published in a student journal across the country a week after her thesis had been turned in, so she avoided an uncomfortable and unwarranted inquiry from our school). The likelihood of that sort of thing is only increased in the instance of journalism, where there is now a huge pool of reporters, professional and "amateur" alike, writing about a smaller range of topics, since there are only so many issues that are "newsworthy" in a given news cycle.
While I know nothing, of course, of how this DP columnist got her information, it is not beyond reason to think that, being surrounded by the same national advertising campaigns, branding, grocery store set-ups and offering, etc., as whoever wrote the Yahoo! Foods article, she hit on similar points as that person regarding the same brands (although I will grant that the fact that the beverages are listed in the same order is somewhat fishy and points more towards the "typist" vs. "collator" model discussed above - and if someone can think of a descriptor better than collator, I'd much appreciate it, because that's not quite right). The world is getting smaller (or, if you're Friedman, just flat), the numbers of commentators and journalists are getting expontentially larger, and there's a limited number of original thoughts in the world -- plagiarism is not the necessary conclusion every time there's a similarity.