A Chennai reader, R. Sivakumar, drew our attention to one of the unresolved issues in journalism: repetitions in the work of writers who have domain expertise. He referred to two articles by Navin Chawla, who is the biographer of Mother Teresa and the former Chief Election Commissioner of India, that appeared over a span of three years: “ > The Mother Teresa her critics choose to ignore ” (August 26, 2013) and “ > A journey to sainthood ” (September 3, 2016). These two pieces were similar in their focus and there were many words, phrases, and sentences in the second article that were indistinguishable from the first one. “As an ombudsman of this century-old and prestigious newspaper, I request you to kindly explain to ardent readers of this newspaper like me the above mistake,” Mr. Sivakumar said.
When I began investigating this query, I realised that I am also guilty of repeating myself when it comes to quoting people whom I respect. I have repeated the same strings of words on more than a couple of occasions. The oft-repeated quotes were: “excursion in erudition” (Umberto Eco), “journalism is the best job in the world” (Gabriel Garcia Marquez), “theory of interlocking public” (Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel), “is nothing sacred?” (Salman Rushdie), “comment is free, but facts are sacred” (C.P. Scott), and “Journalism is partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard about in the past 24 hours — distorted, despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias, by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read it in about an hour” (David Broder).
If a columnist is smitten by the power of some words and seduced by some quotes and uses them repeatedly, what happens to biographers who have invested a substantial amount of time, energy and intellect on their subjects? Gerald Martin, biographer of Marquez, talked about the time and effort invested in writing a biography. “If ever a subject was worth investing a quarter of one’s own life in, it would undoubtedly be the extraordinary life and career of Gabriel Garcia Marquez,” he said. What Marquez meant to Martin is what Mother Teresa meant to Mr. Chawla.
The bug called repetition Repetition is a bug that did not spare even William Shakespeare. In October 2009, Time magazine carried an article by Gaëlle Faure, which was based on an interview with Sir Brian Vickers, a literature professor and one of the earliest literary scholars to use plagiarism-detection software. Prof. Vickers not only established that The Reign of Edward III was the joint work of Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd but also noticed about 200 strings of three or more words in Edward III , published in 1596, that matched phrases in Shakespeare’s other works. Some of Shakespeare’s recycled bits of phrases pointed out by Prof. Vickers are: “come in person hither,” “pale queene of night,” “thou art thy selfe,” “author of my blood” and even the whole phrase “lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”
Bob Garfield, the co-host of On the Media, which is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR, writing for The Guardian said: “Writers recycle material: as long as it’s their own, that may be bad form but it’s not a crime. Still, we do need a good word for it.” Some academics use the term ‘self-plagiarism’ which Garfield rejects. He says: “There is no such thing as self-plagiarism, any more than there is such a thing as self-burglary. You can’t steal from yourself… No, clearly, we need a term to describe a writer with a history of situational repurposing — and I'll leave that to you.”
Reiterating ideas While the rules that govern plagiarism are clear, do we have a yardstick to deal with repetition? One of the challenges of creating a strict code for this act is that it would undermine the need for multiple reiterations that make new ideas and novel approaches operational. Sometimes repetition happens because some people are good at one subject or one idea. There are also questions about how one can write two different sentences to say the same thing. Will it not amount to lack of consistency?
I don’t think readers get worked up when one is reiterating an idea. They feel short-changed only when the exact words are repeated within a short span by the same writer on the same subject. The biographer’s burden is that they tend to feel that certain events or vignettes of their subjects’ life are defining and tend to repeat it. Newspapers prefer to seek biographers to write about significant personalities because they are best placed to give a comprehensive picture.
I spoke to a few colleagues in the Organisation of News Ombudsmen (ONO) about this issue and what would be their guidelines for news organisations to deal with similar situations. After considerable thought, they said that we should make the rules of attribution uniform across the board — whether one is quoting an expert or oneself — to address the ethical part of this conundrum.
This exercise was a chastening experience, which brought home the larger question of accountability to the readers. One of the earliest lessons we learn in the newsroom is that every single article must make sense to a potential new reader and so it has to be reasonably comprehensive. With this investigation, I also learnt another cardinal lesson: it is not enough for individual articles to be complete, but when read as a body of work they should not be reduced to an echo chamber. By adhering to these twin rules, a writer respects the memory of the readers.
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
