Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson has been accused of plagiarism of multiple passages of her latest book, Merchants of Truth: Inside the News Revolution. She has also been accused of factual inaccuracies in reporting for the book, specifically interviews of Vice employees.
Abramson’s book is about the change in the US news industry, told through the journey of four organisations: Buzzfeed, Vice, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
In a Twitter thread, Vice News journalist Michael C Moynihan accused Abramson of lifting certain passages pertaining to Vice, a digital news organisation based in the US.
Moynihan stated that he first started looking into the book after seeing "an egregious error" about Arielle Duhaime-Ross, his Vice News colleague who was wrongly identified as transgender in an initial review copy, reports BBC. Significantly, Arielle Duhaime-Ross has also accused Abramson of factual inaccuracy.
Ian Frisch, a freelance journalist and editor, also spoke up regarding Abramson using his work in her book without proper attribution. He also said, “this article was hosted on my personal website – nowhere else. So Jill went to my PERSONAL WEBSITE, lifted my reporting, and put it in her book.”
I Didn’t Plagiarise: Abramson’s Response
In an interview with Fox News, Abramson defended her work by saying “I certainly didn’t plagiarise in my book, and there’s 70 pages of footnotes showing where I got the information.”
She also reiterated her stance in a series of tweets on Twitter.
Simon & Schuster, Abramson’s publisher, in an emailed statement to Vox said, through a representative:
“It has been published with an extraordinary degree of transparency, each of the four news organizations covered in the book was given ample time and opportunity to comment on the content, and where appropriate, the author made changes and corrections. If upon further examination changes or attributions are deemed necessary, we stand ready to work with the author in making those revisions.”Statement by Simon & Schuster
But Journalists Aren’t Amused
Will Abramson take responsibility? Or will the book go on to become a bestseller? Either way, it has certainly given journalists across the world something to chew on.
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