Thread by @mcmoynihan

So...Jill Abramson's book has finally hit bookstore shelves. A few weeks ago, reading a galley copy, I noticed an egregious error about my colleague @adrs. She tweeted it out, a shit storm followed, Abramson corrected the mistake.

*All three* chapters on Vice were clotted with mistakes. Lots of them. The truth promised in Merchants of Truth was often not true. While trying to corroborate certain claims, I noticed that it also contained...plagiarized passages.

The following examples from the final book—not the galley—are only from the Vice chapters (I didn’t check the others). So let’s begin...Here is Abramson on Gavin McInnes (whom she interviewed) and the Ryerson Review of Journalism rrj.ca/bigot-or-champ…

This passage, on former Vice News editor Jason Mojica, is lifted from a 2010 Time Out magazine piece, with small modifications: timeout.com/chicago/things…

This paragraph can be sourced to two places: a *masters thesis* and a 2013 New Yorker piece by Lizzie Widdicombe
digital.library.ryerson.ca/islandora/obje…
newyorker.com/magazine/2013/…

This example is from one source--the New Yorker again--though the two sentences are separated by a page.
newyorker.com/magazine/2013/…

Here Abramson--in a treatise on journalistic ethics--copies a passage from...the Columbia Journalism Review
cjr.org/the_new_gateke…

There’s lesser stuff too; still problematic. At various points in Merchants of Truth, rather than toil in the archives, reading old issues of the magazine or watching old Vice videos, Abramson liberally borrows from those who have:
newyorker.com/magazine/2013/…

There’s plenty more--enormous factual errors, other cribbed passages, single or unsourced claims--but this should give a sense.

The book ends with a final wag of the finger, reminding me that my colleagues apparently don’t possess “the expertise to compete on the biggest news stories.” If Abramson is the arbiter of ethics & expertise, I think we’re doing just fine.