Two days ago, I received an e-mail message from Editor-in-Chief David Horowitz of frontpagemag.com. He wrote that he would look into my charge that for a recent frontpagemag article, writer Alexis Amory had stolen a lengthy passage from a piece by Arjan Dasselaar. Dasselaar is a Dutch journalist who runs a well-regarded English-language blog called Zacht Ei. Scroll down a few posts for the details. Horowitz may have had a little talk with Amory — who today, on frontpagemag, comes clean. Or maybe not quite. She claims to be a purely accidental plagiarizer. Key quote:
"I had seen the item on a third party's website, and this source mentioned neither Dasselaar nor the blog Zacht Ei; it presented the material as though it were a quotation from the newspaper. Thus, I was under the impression the quotations were taken directly from Algemeen Dagblad and did not cite Zacht Ei; I would not have hesitated to attribute the comments to Mr. Dasselaar had I known they were his."
Let's leave aside for a moment the slightly troubling fact that Amory decided it was OK to lift the whole passage, verbatim, from a foreign newspaper (with attribution, but without quotemarks — which made it seem as if she was actively paraphrasing, instead of lazily cutting and pasting another journalist's words). Let's focus instead on her claim of inadvertent plagiarism, which rests entirely on the existence of a third-party site that was itself negligent in crediting the Zacht Ei blog. I don't know about you, but I'm curious: Which site was that? Which web page? Which post?
Here's a thought: Why not verify Amory's explanation by googling a few choice text strings from the plagiarized passages? Anyone can easily check if those phrases appear anywhere on the web on a date that falls between November 6 (the day of the original Zacht Ei post) and November 29 (the day the frontpagemag article appeared).
The results I got do not support Amory's claim. Google tells me there's only one other site (in addition to Zacht Ei and frontpagemag.com) that contains the same disputed sentences. It's www.dorrk.com, and you can see the page in question here. However, this cannot be the site that caused Amory to make her mistake. That's because the text at dorrk.com doesn't say anything about the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper. This is odd, isn't it? Think about it: Amory, in today's follow-up, says she erroneously thought the passages under dispute had appeared (in Dutch) in Algemeen Dagblad. But according to Google, she could only have found them — elegantly summarized in English, and fully attributed — on Zacht Ei, and lifted them from there. After all, if she'd taken the text from dorrk.com, she wouldn't and couldn't have known the Algemeen Dagblad provenance.
This is damning evidence on its face, but of course Amory deserves the benefit of the doubt. After all, Google may not be perfect, and my wife occasionally shocks me by implying I'm not infallible either. Anyway, the truthfulness of Amory's explanation couldn't be easier to settle. If what she says is correct, and she's serious about defending her reputation (and frontpagemag's credibility), she shouldn't hesitate to finger the culprit who led her astray.
After I politely prodded him by e-mail, Horowitz says he's on the case once again. Amory will have some more 'splaining to do. The saga continues.
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UPDATE: Barely fifteen minutes after I posted this, it's over. Horowitz, in a somewhat terse e-mail to me, concedes my point. "We've looked into this, and you are right," he writes. "We will not be publishing any more work by this writer." That's probably the right decision, but I don't feel the least bit triumphant. On the contrary — I feel like I have a hangover. Amory describes herself on frontpagemag as a professional journalist "of 25 years' standing," and on that point at least, I have no reason to doubt her words. I don't even know her, and I owe her no sympathy, but regardless: it's no fun, none, to see a colleague crash and burn like that.
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