Plagiarism fallout in Texas

The Texas press has picked up on the Bulletin pla­gia­rism scan­dal, and some of the facts from the small paper’s side have emerged.

The Houston Chronicle reported that the Bulletin’s pub­lisher, Mike Ladyman said he “didn’t take Rosen more seri­ously because he didn’t real­ize the extent of the alle­ga­tions.” The Chronicle’s arti­cle also lets us know that the accused pla­gia­rist, Mark Williams, was a free­lancer who had worked for the Bulletin for the past six years.

Now, accord­ing to the Houston Press, the Montgomery County paper will be shut­ting down for the time being, par­tially thanks to the dozens of nasty e-mails pub­lisher Ladyman has received. Ladyman told the Press about his paper, “It’s dead right now. I’m not bring­ing out another issue. I’ll just close it up.”

Ladyman went on in the Press inter­view to say that Slate writer Jody Rosen’s arti­cle about the pla­gia­rism was “an attack, an attention-grabbing hatchet job” and that Rosen never showed him more than the first three exam­ples of pla­gia­rism before pub­lish­ing the Slate article.

Ladyman described the cir­cum­stances around Rosen’s accu­sa­tions from his point of view, say­ing that he was on a dead­line when Rosen first called and could not talk for as long as Rosen wanted. Later, when Ladyman took the exam­ples of pla­gia­rism to Williams, the accused writer told his pub­lisher that he had sim­ply copied mate­r­ial he’d received in press releases. “I don’t know if I believed him fully,” Ladyman told the Press.

Now, and I hate to bor­row too much from one source, espe­cially given the nature of the story, the Press also pub­lished a let­ter writ­ten by Williams in response to Rosen’s accusations.

You have done an exem­plary job of expos­ing the seedy under­belly of duplic­i­tous small town weekly news­pa­pers and the evil doers that run them. You have indeed brought us to our knees

...[Y]ou have most def­i­nitely gar­nered the atten­tion of the blog­gers that you evi­dently crave in abun­dance with this man­u­fac­tured scan­dal. So my advice, if I may offer a small slice, is to enjoy the spot­light while it is yours — have your­self a ball! You are the vic­tor, so do enjoy the spoils.

...It must have taken years of sea­soned inves­tiga­tive know-how to push me off my lofty perch. It takes a dogged, intre­pid jour­nal­ist to expose the alleged wrong­do­ings of a 44-year-old col­lege dropout who drifted from one lousy media job to another for 20 years; it takes courage to debase some­one with a mouth­ful of cut-rate den­tures who, up until 2007, lived in his par­ents’ home for seven years due to near-fatal bouts of clin­i­cal depres­sion; it takes a jour­nal­ist of a cer­tain cal­iber to tor­pedo a pathetic hack who has barely squeezed out a liv­ing for nearly a decade at seven cents a word.

He goes on to say that Bulletin has done some good work in its time, such as keep­ing “a hate­ful rogue ele­ment of the local Republican Party from tak­ing con­trol of our county library sys­tem and rip­ping the Constitution to shreds.” Apparently that jus­ti­fies immoral jour­nal­is­tic prac­tices. I guess you have to break a few eggs, right?

Good grief, Williams. Even a 20-year vet­eran hack should know the dif­fer­ence between what words of a press release you can use and which ones you can’t. And, by god, depres­sion or not — and espe­cially after your lit­tle dia­tribe about your egal­i­tar­ian aims — lazy jour­nal­ism is never, ever OK.

Related posts:

1. Plagiarism in east Texas
2. Joseph M. Williams, 1933–2008
3. Need a job?
4. Plagiarism means some­thing dif­fer­ent now
5. Posner and Plagiarism