Today, class, we begin with a pop quiz. Who is Jayson Blair? You know the answer of course, but some journalism students don’t. Renee Petrina, who teaches at Ball State University, was shocked to discover that her students had no clue what Blair had done to get himself fired by the New York Times. Said Petrina: This. Is. Bad.
In fairness, as Steve Buttry points out, the Blair scandal happened more than six years ago, when college freshmen were still in middle school. If they want to be journalists, they should learn about the case in class; it may be too much to expect them to know about it already. But Petrina raises a much bigger concern when she mentions having found multiple cases of “blatant copy-and-paste plagiarism” in papers handed in by upperclassmen.
Yes, today’s college students grew up in the age of file sharing (often illegal) and Wikipedia (often wrong). They think nothing of scanning the Web and calling it research. But by the time they’re juniors and seniors, they ought to know that plagiarism is not okay, even if they’re not journalism majors. Academic honor codes make it plain that copying someone else’s work and calling it your own is a punishable offense, right?
Somehow, the message isn’t getting through, not even to journalism students, who typically take at least one ethics course before graduating. And newsrooms sometimes find that out the hard way, when a young reporter pulls a Jayson Blair, fabricating or stealing material for a story.
What does Jayson Blair himself think about all this? He hasn’t spoken publicly about his firing, except in his “tell all” book that the Los Angeles Times labeled “self-pitying and unreliable.” Now, he’s about to.
Blair will be the keynote speaker next week at Washington and Lee University’s Journalism Ethics Institute. Prof. Edward Wasserman, who invited Blair, says he expects to hear “about the pressures and temptations that might induce ambitious and talented young journalists elsewhere in the business to do the wrong thing.”
Here’s what worries me: No matter how much pressure there is in a newsroom to get the big scoop, how is it that “talented young journalists” fail to understand that doing the wrong thing is, well, wrong?
