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April 2001
International Quote-Lift
Among foreign correspondents, one reporter's direct quote is every reporter's direct quote.
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By
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Lifting copy is simply part of the job. |
On January 16, The Washington Post ran a front-page story about how educators are looking to drop The Catcher in the Rye from their lesson plans. The next day, Robert Tait, a U.S.-based correspondent for The Scotsman, Scotland's biggest newspaper, filed a story on the same topic. Except for the lead paragraphs, Tait's article seems to have been cut and pasted from the Post: Tait quoted the same four sources, in the exact same order, saying exactly what they'd said in the original story. Tait had not actually spoken to any of them. "I thought that was a very good story," he says. "It was very well written, very well told. I simply lifted it."
Tait may be comfortable with the appropriation because, although this was an extreme case, lifting quotes from articles by other reporters is a common practice for correspondents posted outside their publications' home countries. This borrowing is normally limited to statements made by public officials, however. Serge Schmemann, deputy foreign editor at The New York Times, says that for reporters based in other countries, "there has always been a presumption that a certain amount of borrowing of quotes from officials is legitimate."
A look at the work of some U.S.-based correspondents for British newspapers reveals that Tait is not the only one bending the rules: A U.S. correspondent for The Guardian, Martin Kettle, passed off quotes given to the Chicago Tribune by Marta Mercado, the housekeeper who deep-sixed the nomination of Linda Chavez to the Bush cabinet, as his own. James Bone, a New York-based reporter for London's Times, lifted a quote from a small California paper about a local murder. The Glasgow Herald, the Belfast News Letter, The Guardian, and The Express all used the same quote from an Associated Press story about a proposed pardon for Wild West gunslinger Billy the Kid. None of them credited the AP.
The reporters give many reasons for their liberal borrowing. Kettle, who has been based in Washington, D.C., for four years, blames the time difference. "When you are working for a British paper in the States, your deadlines are effectively 1 PM" he says. "I've filed 860 stories in the last two and a quarter years, and inevitably a lot of them are cut, lift, and paste." Bone, meanwhile, chalks up the occasional lack of attribution to cultural differences. "There is no convention in British journalism of attributing quotes to papers that no one has ever heard of," he says.
Some Americans reporting from abroad acknowledge that they, too, sometimes crib quotes from other papers. "We simply can't be everywhere at the same time," explains Warren Hoge, who writes from The New York Times's London bureau. Agreeing with his Times colleague Schmemann, though, Hoge says he limits his borrowing to relaying a spokesperson's comments or a politician's speech and won't lift quotes from exclusive interviews.
The Scotsman's Tait says that what he did with the Catcher in the Rye story is "a necessary evil." Says Tait, "When you're reporting in your own country you're basically doing your own legwork. When you're abroad, what you are trying to do is much more of a writing job." He says the decision about whether to credit another paper is a subtle one, and boils down to: "Does it look silly or not?" He often assumes his editors prefer that he leave credits off. Tait's editors at The Scotsman would not comment for this article.
Schmemann understands the pressures of reporting from abroad but disagrees with Tait's methods: "When you get the kind of quotes that are very difficult to get and take independent work, and you use those [without attribution,] then that's bordering on theft." 
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