Ezra Klein: Generation Y Did I Write That?

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March 24, 2006

Generation Y Did I Write That?

In some ways, the most interesting thing about Ben Domenech's plagiarism is its discovery. If you're a young writer reading this blog, tattoo this on your typing fingers: The internet never forgets.

It's not that Ben's plagiarism ceased, as it's appeared to continue, in slightened form, even after graduation from William and Mary. But the bulk of it certainly took place there, much of it in meaningless movie reviewettes for the school paper, writings that Domenech, almost certainly, assumed were irrelevant nothings long ago lost to the mists of history. And yet here they are: resurrected, and shuffling forth to eat Ben's face.

Sorry, but zombie analogies are fun.

It is a bit of a scary thought, though. Most of us don't plagiarize, and, in any case, we shouldn't, so I've relatively little sympathy for cut-and-paste pieces that get inconveniently control-V'd later in life. But with so many hungry young writers founding blogs and spitting out quickly-conceived, occasionally inadvisable posts to feed their readerships, there's a lot of embarrassing material out there for those seeking to dig it up. The electric paper trail we're leaving is beyond voluminous, and the nature of the medium virtually assures that some of our droppings along the road will be, in retrospect, intellectually bankrupt, or intemperate, or obviously wrong. God knows I've got a few of those floating around. I started doing this at 18, and despite how little I know now, I knew a helluva lot less back then.

A California political operative I know has a maxim he likes to repeat: Don't ever write it if you can say it, don't ever say it if you can whisper it, don't ever whisper it if you can imply it, don't ever imply it if you can nudge it, don't ever nudge it if you can wink it, and don't ever wink it if you can help it. I thought it a pretty ugly piece of advice, but spot-on if you wanted to enter politics. It's why I decided to become a writer instead. But man is my generation, packed full of LiveJournals and MySpaces and blogs and e-mails and messageboards, going to get bit in the ass by that aphorism.

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» Washington Post Steps In It ~ Domenech Resigns from The Agonist
A few days ago I wrote, "This is probably the dumbest thing the Washington Post Online could have done from a long-term business perspective. First the whole Red State/Blue State meme is on the way out. Second, giving voice to one of the founders of racis [Read More]

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» Washington Post's Resigned Conservative Blogger Calls His Former Bosses "Fools" (UPDATED) from The Moderate Voice
The Washington Post's former conservative blogger Ben Domenech who resigned yesterday amid allegations that he plagiarized past work has ripped into his former editors, calling them "fools". His fiery retort comes in a story on the ... [Read More]

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» The Ben Domenech Affair from New Harper's Mews
It looks like a rather nasty flap has been going on in the Blogosphere that Ive been mostly unaware of. Then again, Ive never read any of Ben Domenechs writings, or even knew of his existence until this day. For those of you unawa... [Read More]

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Comments

Isn't there an alternative: that people will become more realistic about the difference between personal and professional lives (e.g. ABC News guy sharing his personal view with a friend) and more realistic about the fact that people take all kinds of positions over a lifetime.
Ahh probably not, what am I thinking?!

Posted by: slickdpdx | Mar 24, 2006 12:15:42 PM

It wasn't just college plagiarism. Domenech plagiarized parts of an NRO article published after he graduated.

It wasn't just an isolated indiscresion. Ben has been lifting other people's work for years.

These writings were part of Ben's professional life. Writing in the school paper were part of Domenech's professional life. In fact, they are an integral part of his resume for the Post position because he has virtually no journalistic experience.

Plagiarism is a serious offense. It's the sort of thing that would get someone fired from a paper, or expelled from school. Getting kicked off the school paper for plagiarism would end a normal person's journalistic career.

Posted by: Lindsay Beyerstein | Mar 24, 2006 12:47:08 PM

Um, I agree. Hence this, calling for his termination . This post isn't about plagiarism (and it's certainly not a defense of it), it's about the internet's elephantine memory.

Posted by: Ezra | Mar 24, 2006 12:50:35 PM

Graduated? I think that needs an answer, Atrios calls him a dropout.

Posted by: evilchemistry | Mar 24, 2006 1:23:22 PM

I should have cited the slickdpdx quote that I was responding to:

Isn't there an alternative: that people will become more realistic about the difference between personal and professional lives

Ezra, I think you're right that we're living with historically unprecedented paper trails. So, I think it's important to start talking about when it's fair and relevant to use that information against someone.

I think Ben's a textbook case of a relevant objection: Relatively recent. Professional work in his field, not personal/social stuff. Published work that violated existing editorial standards (as opposed to a blog or a blog comment where discourse is less formal).

Posted by: Lindsay Beyerstein | Mar 24, 2006 1:24:48 PM

As a writer, I am baffled as to why people plagiarize. If you don't like writing things yourself, why on earth enter this profession? It's hardly known for its quick riches. Quite the contrary, in fact: the primary rewards of putting words on the page have to do with such nebulous psychological concepts as pleasure, satisfaction, and creative realization. Of course it's lovely to be published, to have other human beings take pleasure in something you created. It validates you, or at least, it validates what you were thinking and writing at that point in time. But mainly, we write because we must; we write therefore we are.

So in the end, while I may feel anger toward plagiarists, I also feel a certain amount of pity for them. They are writer-wannabes without talent who press their noses up against the glass, staring in at what they imagine is a thrilling party that rocks on without them. And rather than admit this to themselves, they steal someone else's hard-won invitation. They completely miss the point of writing; they completely miss out on the joy of it.

Posted by: litbrit | Mar 24, 2006 1:25:00 PM

Lindsey: I was responding to what Ezra's post was about, the elephantine memory of the internet, not about Domenech. That's the reason I gave a non-Domenech example. I agree that plagiarism is a serious matter.

Posted by: slickdpdx | Mar 24, 2006 1:28:46 PM

Sorry, slick. I misunderstood.

Posted by: Lindsay Beyerstein | Mar 24, 2006 1:34:27 PM

No shit- I had a blog in my real name for a couple months (before it was cool) and even though it's gone there are references and pasted quotes on other blogs that are still around, so if you google my name this 4 month experiment will show up forever. Not to mention the wayback machine still has the whole thing once you know the address. (I didn't say anything embarrassing or plagiarize anything, but my political opinions are there for all future employers to find.)
Clearly the solution is to censor search engines.

Posted by: SP | Mar 24, 2006 1:48:12 PM

But of course, the "internet generation" will change the old rules. At some point, someone's going to win public office despite having a long trail on the internet, and we're just going to get used to the fact that everyone has long careers and says goofy things from time to time.

Our current and most recent President have managed to overcome their "checkered" pasts, since they got to control the story and were given the benefit of the doubt by the press corps.

Posted by: Nicholas Beaudrot | Mar 24, 2006 1:59:22 PM

Since BD did not graduatedfrom college I wonder if perhaps the university caught onto his plagiarism when he was writing for the college newspaper. William & Mary has a strict honor code. Given the extent of his thievery I can't help but wonder if he was busted and then left school.

Posted by: did he get booted from W & M | Mar 24, 2006 2:07:32 PM

"Ezra, I think you're right that we're living with historically unprecedented paper trails. So, I think it's important to start talking about when it's fair and relevant to use that information against someone."

But this is politics, of course. Fair and relevant will always be pushed aside if the dirt is good.

Petey became Petey purely so I don't have to self-censor.

Posted by: Petey | Mar 24, 2006 2:31:35 PM

I post everything under my real name (where possible -- if I have to register and my real name is gone I use my first and middle names). I also take some time to think about what I post. I'm not ashamed to stand behind anything I've ever written, with the exception of some bad teenage poetry.

Posted by: Jon Parker | Mar 24, 2006 2:43:35 PM

Thanks for the apology. I do think the plagiarism thing is slippery. Example I recently ran across:
Espy described the inherent cruelty in treating the condemned in such a manner, and under any definition or theory, such conditions surely constitute a "punishment" in addition to the execution itself. In explaining that the death row inmate often suffers a more agonizing anticipation of death than his or her victim did, he stated:
[D]eath itself is probably a merciful release from the agony and torment that they have suffered during their long period of confinement. No individual murderer confines the victim to restricted quarters over a sustained period of time ... [which the victim] knows the manner in which death will come and the time at which it will arrive, hoping against hope for the magical reprieve, stay, or commutation that might prolong his life.
vs.
Albert Camus (1957):
An execution is not simply death. It is just as different from the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison. It adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, an organization which is itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death. Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.

Posted by: slickdpdx | Mar 24, 2006 2:53:32 PM

I started writing dumbshit stuff when I was 12, though it was all for mimeographed publications with circulations in the few hundreds, or at most in a few cases, a few thousands.

But I started writing for Usenet in 1995, and have thousands of posts googleable there (put my name into "Google Groups" search, and you'll get over 30,000 mentions); I blog under my birth name (okay, minus the middle name), and have always written under it, because my only belief is that people who think using pseudonyms will protect themselves are badly fooling themselves; my opinion is that if you don't consider that something you write even to one other person -- or in a printed diary only you yourself think you will see -- is very likely to sooner or later wind up read by the person in the world you'd most like to not have read it, you're apt to have a very bad surprise sooner or later.

I've just seen it happen far too many times over thirty years to think it makes any sense to not expect this to happen, though it will take a long time for some, and some will be lucky their whole life.

But assuming that you're in that lucky "some," well, good luck with that.

(E-mails can be endlessly copied; send it to someone else, and it's out of your hands forever; even something only on your hard drive, or in hardcopy in your desk drawer, may wind up in someone else's hands; and if you write enough material under a pseudonym, you're eventually going to provide enough clues -- let alone in combination with IP address -- to get outed, in all likelihood.)

Everything else I have to say about the Domenech plagiarism and Redstate reaction and such I've said in the Obsidian Wings comment thread. But I'd hoped for another hour or so before Domenech resigned; Redstate.org immediately crashed, which is pretty funny. (I really liked the "but everyone plagiarizes!; you don't realize how hard it is not to do!" defense.)

Posted by: Gary Farber | Mar 24, 2006 3:04:33 PM

Let's see, if a billion bloggers post 5000 words a day, how long before identical passages start turning up by accident? Especially if all billion are posting about Ben Domenech or Snakes on a Plane?

Posted by: bob mcmanus | Mar 24, 2006 3:44:13 PM

I don't hold with the boosterism that predicts that blogs will replace journalism, but it's distinctly probable that blogs will replace punditry. Heck, they (including you) are already halfway there.

The fact that this Domenech kid was plucked from obscurity and briefly given the Wash Post imprimatur seems to me only evidence that we're in a transitional stage. I humbly predict that MSM outlets will be out of the op-ed business in a decade or so, and will concentrate on straight journalism, where they will have large advantages over DIYers for the foreseeable future.

But if blogs, rather than MSM, are the punditry outlets of the future, they don't have the institutional concerns that traditional publications do. In blogdom, a plagiarism incident, if anyone even noticed, would elicit a day's worth of "not cool, dude", and everyone would move on. But of course no one's going to Googlefisk Atrios or Instapundit in the first place, because they are independent. No big institution's reputation is at stake.

After all, Ben Domenech can still blog to his heart's content. Indeed, his native following has probably been if anything enhanced by this episode.

Posted by: kth | Mar 24, 2006 6:27:54 PM

Excellent post, Ezra. Poor Ben can only dream of such droppings along the internet highway. This is one you can be proud of. Even the Zombies liked it.

Posted by: Zack | Mar 24, 2006 7:38:06 PM

Unfortunately, the Domenech thing will now be used as another excuse to federally police the blogosphere.

Ironically, its the blogosphere who policed Domenech and ultimately forced him to resign.

Posted by: carla | Mar 24, 2006 9:01:05 PM

Before the internets came along, I remember thinking how lucky I was that I grew up when camcorders were still expensive. I shuddered to think about what kind of Spring Break videos people were going to have to explain when they ran for office or took any high-profile position.

Oy, these poor, poor children of the internets.

Posted by: theorajones | Mar 27, 2006 6:14:06 PM

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