Jill Abramson, reeling from revelations she pilfered material for her journalism book, climbed the ladder at the New York Times with help from the paper’s worst plagiarism scandal.
When Jayson Blair, then 27, admitted he invented comments and scenes in 2003, Abramson, then Washington bureau chief, was named to a 20-person panel to determine what went wrong. Three months later, she was named managing editor as the scandal shook the paper.
But now facing a scandal of her own, Abramson, who went on to be the Times’ first female executive editor from 2011 to 2014, hasn’t been banished from polite society, unlike Blair, whose recent career moves include freelancing as a life coach in suburban Virginia.
Abramson was flummoxed by the notion she was being treated differently from Blair. “I don’t have an answer to your double standard argument,” Abramson said in an email to the Washington Examiner. “I’ve apologized for serious sourcing errors and promptly corrected them.”
Vigorously defending Abramson, Bill Keller, her former boss and predecessor as executive editor, said that “the gleeful piling on is getting to be a little creepy.” He added: “I would hardly describe what Jill’s going through as being ‘given a pass.’ Her reputation, deservedly stellar, is under fierce attack, and, after her family, her reputation is her most prized possession. “
“As I recall, Jason was not accused of failing to attribute information, he flat-out made stuff up. Fabrication is a capital crime in journalism,” he said. “As far as I know, nobody has suggested that Jill made things up.”
Blair was accused of “widespread plagiarism and fabrication” including failing to attribute material, according to a New York Times article published two months before Keller ascended from columnist on the newspaper to executive editor.
Abramson remains listed online as a Harvard University senior lecturer. She is still a member of the elite American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the organization confirmed. Blair, on the other hand, lost his job and reputation.
Mark Feldstein, a University of Maryland journalism professor who is working on a book about media malpractice, suggested that Abramson’s hallowed reputation as a former New York Times executive editor accounts for her being treated with much greater indulgence.
“There is a double standard in all of society in every endeavor, where those with more power and wealth are often held to lower standards,” he said. “There’s one standard for the powerful, the wealthy, and the famous, and there’s one for the rest of us.”
Abramson spoke at two of Washington’s most respectable media forums this week: the Newseum on Wednesday and the National Press Club on Thursday — despite evidence that she appropriated from other sources in at least six sections of her book, Merchants of Truth: Inside the News Revolution.
The book remains on store shelves and available online, with publisher Simon & Schuster refusing to pulp copies. Abramson vowed to correct errors, but it’s unclear if there will be a second book printing and the publisher did not respond to multiple requests for information.
Abramson, ultimately fired by the Times, became the paper’s No. 2 editor under Keller in the wake of the Blair scandal. She was listed as a “winner” of the scandal by the New York Post, even before her promotion.
But Feldstein, the University of Maryland professor and a former on-air reporter for CNN and ABC News, said that even fabrication gets a pass for media elites, pointing to NBC News anchor Brian Williams’ rehabilitation after the revelation he told many lies, including about being in an aircraft under attack.
“If I had done that when I was in television, I would have been gone in 24 hours, and so would almost anybody else. And I think we’re seeing some of the same things with Jill Abramson,” Feldstein said.
The media’s double standard for plagiarism and related ethical misconduct, Feldstein believes, can be explained by the chumminess of society’s elite, who “fraternize with each other” and feel sympathy for friends. “With some lowly person, it’s easier for someone at the top who doesn’t even know them to say, ‘Give them the death penalty,'” he said.
University of Florida journalism professor Mindy McAdams said people are usually swiftly dismissed from reporting careers over plagiarism and related offenses because “you need to get rid of them — they can’t be trusted. “
McAdams said plagiarism in a book is even more egregious than in a news article, though “in the case of a book, there’s no firing to be done.” She added that she was not sure Abramson would survive the scandal unscathed. “I don’t think we will forget this, and so far, I don’t think she has offered a full and complete explanation of how those paragraphs got into her book.”
