Former New York Times Executive Editor Accused Of Plagiarism Throughout Her New Book — Here's What's Going On
Jill Abramson served as the New York Times' executive editor from 2011 until 2014, when she was fired. These days, she's promoting her new book "Merchants of Truth," which bills itself as the "definitive report on the disruption of the news media over the last decade," and takes aim at digital media newcomers like Vice and BuzzFeed.
But the rollout for Abramson's book has hit something of a snag: multiple reporters have accused her of plagiarism throughout the book. In a Twitter thread on Wednesday night, Michael Moynihan — who works at Vice News Tonight, one of Abramson's targets — highlighted six passages that are hard to see as anything other than pure plagiarism:
Shortly afterwards, reporter Ian Frisch added a thread of his own, accusing Abramson of ripping off his work in Relapse Magazine. The language changes more than the passages Moynihan highlights, but the quotes from the article's subject, Thomas Morton, are pulled verbatim from Frisch's piece without attribution:
Morton, the subject of Frisch's article, also published a Medium post last week, titled "What I Learned About Myself From Jill Abramson's Merchants of Truth," where he details a string of inaccuracies in Abramson's writing about him:
If I were to go error-by-error through the remaining 69 pages in the chapter (right now I'm only on page 5) this thing would be a novella. There is a major mistake in practically every sentence. There are chronological sequences so scrambled they literally create instances of the Grandfather Paradox.
[Medium]
Abramson, in the space of a few minutes on Wednesday night, asserted that the accusations were falsely made out of anger by Vice journalists and that she would review the charges. At 10:31 pm she tweeted:
And then two minutes later she added:
Publisher Simon & Schuster appears prepared to stand behind Abramson, with the defense shaping up to be the book's use of endnotes:
The Washington Post reviewed end notes in the back of Abramson's book, which refer to pages where she used material that was not her own. There is no indication in the main text of the book showing which passages require attribution. The Post could not review all of the citations, but found some citations that appear to refer to Frisch's work as well as examples pointed out by Moynihan. The citations are not referenced in the passages where the sourced material was used, and instead are listed with page numbers and organized by chapter.
Abramson's book had already come under fire for other inaccuracies when it came to Vice. Reporter Arielle Duhaime-Ross posted a Twitter thread in mid-January, calling out several factual errors in Abramson's description of her:
Vice reporter Danny Gold also accused Abramson of making up an anecdote:
Meanwhile, more recently, Abramson drew fire from journalists after telling The Cut that she never records her interviews while reporting — which may explain (but not excuse) at least some of these inaccuracies:
I do not record. I've never recorded. I'm a very fast note-taker. When someone kind of says the "it" thing that I have really wanted, I don't start scribbling right away. I have an almost photographic memory and so I wait a beat or two while they're onto something else, and then I write down the previous thing they said. Because you don't want your subject to get nervous about what they just said.
[The Cut]
We'll update this post as more information becomes available.
