Under a week after the New York Times dismissed Kamala Harris’s book plagiarism by attacking the “seizing” investigator Christopher Rufo as possibly racist for bringing it to light, the Times has gotten tough on a writer guilty of a very similar offense. It turns out that sometimes borrowing material verbatim is objectionable to the Times -- at least when its own words are the ones being repeated. The Washington Post has the story: “John Grisham poached material for new book ‘Framed,’ media outlets say.”
Prolific author John Grisham has written a nonfiction collection about wrongful convictions, and it looks likely to join his oeuvre of legal thriller novels as another bestseller.
Although the rude word “plagiarism” was not used, the Post made it clear the Times was mightily offended at the under-credited use of its work.
But the New York Times and ProPublica now say Grisham went too far in his use of their reporting on a murder case in Texas, and they want changes made to the book.
The Times says Grisham’s book “draws comprehensively and without appropriate attribution” from “Blood Will Tell,” a two-part series written by prominent criminal justice reporter Pamela Colloff in 2018. Colloff, who works jointly for the Times and ProPublica, reported on the disputed conviction of Joe Bryan, who was found guilty of his wife’s 1985 murder despite evidence suggesting he was 120 miles away when it took place.
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In the book’s acknowledgments, Grisham mentions reporters (including Colloff) by name. But Grisham’s use of Colloff’s work goes far beyond usual professional practices, according to the Times and ProPublica, with his writing veering close to Colloff’s in dozens of instances.
For example, in her 2018 series, Colloff writes of Bryan’s wife: “Her pink nightgown was drawn up to the top of her thighs, and she was naked from the waist down.”
Grisham’s version is reworded only slightly, swapping the two clauses: “She was naked from the waist down and her pink nightgown was pulled up to her thighs.”
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In an interview with The Post, ProPublica Editor in Chief Stephen Engelberg said his outlet had found more than 50 examples of close similarities between Colloff’s articles and Grisham’s writing. Engelberg pointed out that Colloff’s credit in the book comes after more than 300 pages, and says she should instead be mentioned at the start of the chapter on Bryan.
By contrast, the Times wrote dismissively of Rufo’s findings, which numbered “more than a dozen” instances of plagiarism major and minor, according to Rufo’s researcher Stefan Weber of Austria:
The passages called into question by Mr. Rufo on his Substack platform involve about 500 words in the approximately 65,000-word, 200-page book….The New York Times found that none of the passages in question took the ideas or thoughts of another writer, which is considered the most serious form of plagiarism.
Similar limits apply to Grisham’s borrowings, as flagged by the Times. But it hasn’t stopped the paper and its ProPublica partner from making a public stink about the borrowing when it’s their intellectual property being published without proper credit.
