Gerald Posner - Serial Plagiarist

Gerald Posner, who lied to Harold Weisberg in order to get access to his archives, made his profession and career as a journalist writing Case Close about the assassination of President Kennedy. Here are a few of the articles concerning his plagiarism.


https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/gerald-posner-plagiarized-new-times-pbs-and-many-others-6366613

Miami New Times -

Gerald Posner plagiarized New Times, PBS, and many others

TIM ELFRINK | APRIL 1, 2010 

 "Several well-informed people in Miami Beach have advised me that there is a concerted effort underway to destroy my professional reputation, and in particular to discredit my book Miami Babylon," author Gerald Posner wrote ominously on his website March 22. "Undoubtedly, the book's unvarnished and investigative history has earned its share of enemies."

That's what the South Beach-based author had to say after Miami New Times published eight passages from Frank Owen's 2003 work Clubland that Posner had lifted in a recently published volume about the city's history.

It's also total bullshit. So far at least, the only one burning down Posner's career is the author himself.

Gerald Posner

To wit: In the past week, doctoral student Gregory Gelembiuk and New Times — using special software and perusing texts — have come up with 16 brand-new instances of stolen prose by the author in Miami Babylon (as well as three formerly undisclosed examples from other work). We shared the thievery with Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar and plagiarism expert at St. Petersburg's Poynter Institute.

"These look like obvious cases of plagiarism to me," Clark says. "The fact that Posner at times changes a word or two is not nearly enough to qualify as paraphrase."

New Times sent Posner an email detailing all of the new problems we found in Miami Babylon. He didn't respond to the email or to multiple phone messages.

Posner, on his blog, defends his earlier transgressions by arguing "there are degrees of plagiarism" and that his is less serious because he accidentally copied other people's work.

"Mine is not a case like Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass where there was either wholesale copying from others or in some instances fabrication," Posner wrote March 17. "Any sentences copied by me from published sources were never done with the hope or expectation I'd trick others and get away with it."

Posner, a San Francisco native and Berkeley grad, landed a job when he was just 23 years old with the blue-blood New York law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, according to his Simon & Schuster bio. By 1986, he had left to publish his first book, a biography of Nazi death doctor Josef Mengele.

Posner has been journalism royalty since 1993, when he made best-seller lists and was a Pulitzer finalist for his fifth book, Case Closed, which attempts to prove Oswald acted alone in killing JFK. Since Case Closed, Posner has added to his resumé six more nonfiction works on topics from 9-11 to Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.

In 2004, records show, Posner and his wife Trisha bought a $385,000 condo in SoBe's South of Fifth neighborhood.

When Tina Brown started her Daily Beast website in 2008, she hired Posner as chief investigative reporter. His writing included local stories about Fontainebleau heir Ben Novack Jr.'s death and national pieces on Michael Jackson's last hours. His 454-page book about the sordid history of his new hometown, Miami Babylon, debuted to positive reviews last year.

Everything began unraveling this past February 5, when Slate's media columnist, Jack Shafer, nailed him for stealing seven sentences from the Miami Herald in a Daily Beast piece. Posner said he was "horrified," apologized, and promised it was "inadvertent."

That's when the doctoral student, Gelembiuk, became involved. He's an unlikely journalistic sleuth. A 48-year-old who studies zoology at the University of Wisconsin, he teaches biology and researches invasive species.

For years, Gelembiuk has been using a website called Turnitin.com to catch students who plagiarize. In his experience, Gelembiuk says, plagiarists "never do it just once." After reading Shafer's column, he didn't buy Posner's apology. So he ran a half-dozen of the author's Daily Beast stories through the plagiarism site — as well as through software called Viper and Copyscape — and quickly came up with 11 more lifted sentences in three other Beast stories.

Shafer wrote another column, and on February 10, the Daily Beast accepted Posner's resignation. He again apologized, blaming the "warp speed of the Net" for his problems. He later explained he'd stolen only "the most mundane information." Shafer didn't buy it.

"You don't have to rob from Proust to qualify as a low-down plagiarist," Shafer wrote. "Even mundane information takes time and energy to collect and type up — sometimes more time and energy than it takes to toss off an original sonnet."

But even that excuse went out the window March 16, when New Times published Owen's discovery of eight stolen passages in Miami Babylon. Posner again admitted he stole them. But again he had a scapegoat: a new system of "trailing endnotes" that led him to undercredit Owen's work.

Now comes the new evidence turned up by New Times and Gelembiuk. For Miami Babylon, it seems Posner also borrowed from this publication, PBS, the Herald, Ocean Drive, and Men's Vogue. The pilfering seems to include both stand-alone sentences and longer passages.

Fourteen of the new problems were found by Gelembiuk, who purchased an ebook of Miami Babylon to run it through plagiarism software when Posner's second apology also rang hollow. In our own review, we found two passages that seem to be lifted from one New Times story.

Consider these two passages about developer Don Peebles from a 2003 New Times story and from Miami Babylon. Posner's passage is 27 words long; 22 of them come straight from the New Times story, including the unique phrase "relationship with Barry burned him."

"Beating Whitey," by Francisco Alvarado, Miami New Times, February 6, 2003

In August 1995, however, Don's relationship with Barry burned him. The city council, in a rare move against Barry, balked at a $48 million plan to lease two office buildings from Peebles.

Miami Babylon, page 290

In August 1995, Peebles' close relationship with Barry burned him. The D.C. city council rejected Barry's no-bid $48 million plan to lease two office buildings from Peebles.

Or how about this prose in Miami Babylon about Beach pioneer Carl Fisher's founding of the Indy 500, which looks to be lifted straight from a David McCullough-narrated PBS documentary? Posner, as usual, does a little doctoring. This time, he has five original words out of 40. Almost 90 percent was stolen!

Mr. Miami Beach, PBS American Experience, David McCullough

On Memorial Day 1911, the Brickyard was ready for a new kind of auto race — a one-day, 500-mile event with prizes amounting to $25,100. Eighty-seven thousand people paid a dollar apiece to watch the first Indianapolis 500. This time the track held.

Miami Babylon, pages 20 and 21

On Memorial Day 1911, the "brickyard" was ready for a new Fisher extravaganza — a one-day, 500-mile event, with $25,100 in prizes. Eighty-seven thousand people paid a dollar each to watch the first Indianapolis 500. This time the track surface held.

Here's a doozy from the Herald archives. Notice the first sentence is lifted in full, without a single word changed.

"New Adventure: Ian Schrager Wants to Try His Luck in North Beach, Miami, and Orlando," by Douglas Hanks III, Miami Herald, March 3, 2005

Condo-hotel sales let a hotel pass most of its debt and operating costs onto unit owners while raising millions of dollars in cash up front. Although Schrager faced financial challenges in recent years — including a year in bankruptcy protection for a San Francisco hotel and a scramble to refinance about $355 million in debt partly secured by the Delano — he says his portfolio performs well enough to raise plenty of cash from lenders.

Miami Babylon, page 370

Condo-hotel sales let a hotel pass most of its debt and operating costs onto unit owners while raising millions of dollars in cash up front... Although Schrager had had financial challenges in recent years — including his San Francisco hotel, the Clift, in bankruptcy protection and a frantic scramble to refinance $355 million in debt — he claimed his portfolio was strong enough to raise the necessary cash.

Time and again, Posner takes others' words and passes them off as his own in Miami Babylon. Click here to see all 16 new thefts in full.

Posner's problems weren't limited to outright theft, though, Gelembiuk found. In several instances, the author seems to add, subtract, or misattribute quotes. Consider this passage on page 212 of Miami Babylon about South Beach developer Tony Goldman:

"I always said this was a battle for territory," says Tony Goldman. "As the good people push out the undesirables, the whole area comes back to life."

Posner correctly attributes the quote to a 1987 Miami Herald story. Unfortunately, Tony Goldman — a major character in Babylon — didn't say it. Instead, a developer named Pieter Bakker did.

Or consider this quote on page 96 from tough guy John Roberts, taken from a 2005 New Times preview of the movie Cocaine Cowboys. Roberts is talking about Pittsburgh Steelers players snorting coke at his house during Super Bowl week in 1979. Here's Posner's passage:

They partied and they really partied hard. I mean, you have no idea what these guys would go through. I'm saying, "You guys are going to go out tomorrow and play football?"

The problem: the New Times version didn't include the word tomorrow. So was it another "inadvertent" mistake? Or was Posner trying to make the quote juicier by changing it to imply the Steelers were snorting up the night before playing?

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Again, on our website, we've collected six other instances of apparently altered or misattributed quotes that Gelembiuk rounded up.

Taken as a whole, the new evidence presented here is the most damning yet that Posner isn't a victim of "warp speed" Internet, "trailing endnotes," or a conspiracy.

He's just a serial plagiarist, plain and simple. 

Tim Elfrink is a former investigative reporter and managing editor for Miami New Times. He has won the George Polk Award and was a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.

More Posner Plagiarism

Veteran reporter Gerald Posner is a repeat offender.

By JACK SHAFER

FEB 08, 20105:30 PM

Gerald Posner

Last week, a reader tipped me to an instance of potential plagiarism by Gerald Posner in the Daily Beast, for which Posner is chief investigative reporter. After I called the plagiarism to the attention of Daily Beast Executive Editor Edward Felsenthal, the site deleted five pilfered sentences and added an editor’s note to explain the deletions and to apologize.

In an interview with me, Posner admitted he had plagiarized the Miami Herald in his piece —although he had no explanation for how he had lifted the copy. Posner’s editor, Edward Felsenthal, also acknowledged without flinching that Posner had plagiarized but added that he believed the act to be inadvertent and that Posner would continue to write for the Daily Beast. (I’ve saved a copy of the unexpurgated article.)

But this isn’t the only example of Posner pinching copy without attribution. Slate reader Gregory Gelembuik and I have uncovered additional examples of plagiarism by Posner in the Daily Beast from the Texas Lawyer, a Miami Herald blog, a Miami Herald editorial, a Miami Herald article, and a health care journalism blog.

Posner copied from a July 20, 2009, Texas Lawyer  article in his Feb. 4, 2010, Daily Beast piece titled “Can This Man Save Jacko’s Doctor?” 

Here are the plagiarized passages, with the relevant sections marked in bold:

On Dateline NBC and in other TV interviews over the next few days, Chernoff got out four main messages:Murray was cooperating with the police; he did not prescribe Oxycontin or Demerol to Jackson; he had only briefly been Jackson’s doctor; and many other physicians had treated and prescribed medication for Jackson.

—The Daily Beast, Feb. 4, 2010Chernoff taped the show in Los Angeles on Sunday June 28. During the broadcast, Chernoff says he was able to deliver his main messages about his client:Murray was cooperating with police; he did not prescribe Demerol or Oxycontin to Jackson; he had only treated Jackson for a short period of time; and other doctors had treated and prescribed medication for Jackson.
— Texas Lawyer, July 20, 2009

~~~~~~

Then Chernoff flew to Las Vegas and gave Murray, who had returned to his home there, a secure cell phone to prevent electronic eavesdropping.

—The Daily Beast, Feb. 4, 2010On June 30, Chernoff flew to Las Vegas to bring Murray a secure cell phone to prevent electronic eavesdropping as well as to collect certain documents.

— Texas Lawyer, July 20, 2009

In his Nov. 21, 2009, Daily Beast article, “Murder or Miscarriage?,” Posner plagiarized an Oct. 27, 2009, Miami Herald blog post. Again, the relevant section is marked in bold:

Turned out that 37-year-old Woodward was being held at the Wilshire Division jail, in lieu of $2 million bail on suspicion of murder for the death of an unborn child—believed to be his. At the time, the police said the arrest happened after an investigation revealed “suspicious circumstances of a miscarriage” reported to them only a few days earlier. The fetus was estimated to be in its 13th week.

—The Daily Beast, Nov. 21, 2009Josh Woodward, owner of South Beach’s 8 Oz. Burger Bar, was arrested Sunday in Los Angeles and is being held on at the Wilshire Division jail in lieu of a $2 million bail on suspicion of murder for the death of an unborn child believed to be his. Police say the arrest happened after an investigation on Monday revealed “suspicious circumstances of a miscarriage” that was reported on October 19. The fetus was estimated to be in its 13th week.

—Miami Herald blog, Oct. 27, 2009

Posner plagiarized the Miami Herald again in his July 29, 2009, Daily Beast piece, “Pill Mill Capital Cracks Down“:

Until now, pain clinics have avoided rigorous state inspections because of a legal loophole that exempts facilities that don’t accept medical insurance. Most clinics only take cash. As a result, pill-mill owners and employees don’t have to undergo the background checks required at other medical clinics. More than a dozen doctors and clinic owners in South Florida with disciplinary records or criminal convictions are operating freely. An owner of an Oakland Park pill mill is sitting in jail awaiting trial on charges of trafficking Oxycodone. … 

—The Daily Beast, July 29, 2009Until now, many pain clinics have escaped rigorous state inspections because of a quirk in the law that exempts facilities that don’t take insurance—and many clinics accept cash only. This loophole also allows clinic employees and owners to avoid the background checks required at other health clinics. The Miami Heraldhas identified more than a dozen doctors and clinic owners in South Florida with disciplinary records or criminal convictions. One man continues to own an Oakland Park pain clinic while in jail awaiting trial on charges of trafficking oxycodone.

—Miami Herald, June 19, 2009 (retrieved from Nexis; the St. Petersburg Timesalsoposted the Herald story)

~~~~~~

The new law, passed nearly unanimously in the legislature, requires doctors and pharmacists to record patient prescriptions for most drugs in a state-controlled database.

—The Daily Beast, July 29, 2009The new law, passed nearly unanimously in the Legislature, will require doctors and pharmacists to record patient prescriptions for most drugs in a state-controlled database.

—Miami Herald, June 19, 2009 (retrieved from Nexis; the St. Petersburg Timesalsoposted the Herald story)

Posner also swiped from a Herald editorial and a health care journalism blog (which credits a Herald editorial) for his July 12, 2009, Daily Beast piece, “Jackson and the ‘Pill Mills’ “:

Now the state has become the unofficial national headquarters for a thriving black market in addictive prescription drugs, especially oxycodone, one of the drugs found in the sweep of Jackson’s house after his arrest.

—Daily Beast, July 12, 2009The report describes how Broward has recently become the unofficial national headquarters for a thriving black market in dangerous prescription drugs, especially oxycodone.

—Miami Herald editorial, April 8, 2009 (retrieved from Nexis; reprinted by the Jacksonville Regional Chamber of Commerce)

Plagiarism at the Daily Beast

Veteran journalist Gerald Posner concedes that he lifted from the Miami Herald.

By JACK SHAFER

FEB 05, 20103:18 PM

Gerald Posner

Veteran journalist Gerald Posner acknowledged today that he copied five sentences from a Miami Herald article this week for a piece he wrote for the Daily Beast. The Daily Beast appended an editor’s note to the beginning of Posner’s piece today, explaining that the copying was “inadvertent” and that the Daily Beast has deleted the copied passages.

Here are the relevant sentences from the Feb. 2 Miami Herald story by Julie Brown, which was about a local murder and estate battle:

The Novacks, who wed in 1991, had a tumultuous marriage. In 2002, Narcy Novack and two others tied Novack Jr. to a chair, threatened to kill him and removed money from his safe, according to the police report.”If I can’t have you, no one else will,” she told him, according to a divorce petition he filed and later dropped.At the time, Narcy Novack told police the incident was part of a sex game.She also showed them pornographic pictures of women with artificial limbs, claiming her husband had a fetish for them.

Here are the sentences that have been redacted from Posner’s Feb. 2 Daily Beastpiece:

There is little doubt the Novacks had a volatile relationship. In 2002, 11 years into their marriage, Narcy and two others tied Ben Jr. to a chair, threatened to kill him and took money from his safe, according to the police report filed at the time.”If I can’t have you, no one else will,” she told him, according to a divorce petition Ben Jr. filed and then dropped.Narcy told police investigators at the time that the entire episode was part of a sex game. And she also showed them porno snapshots of women with artificial limbs having sex, claiming her husband had a fetish for them.

(Here’s a cached version of the original Posner article.)

When asked whether what Posner did was plagiarism, Daily BeastExecutive Editor Edward Felsenthal didn’t dodge. Reading aloud from the definition of plagiarism on Dictionary.com—”the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work”—he agreed that that’s what Posner did. “Yeah, you’d have to say it’s plagiarism,” he said. “I do believe it was inadvertent.”

Posner, theDaily Beast’s chief investigative reporter, didn’t make any excuses, either. And he made no effort to escape the P-word, which writers caught stealing copy usually do.

Stating that he was “horrified” at what he did, Posner agreed that it constitutes plagiarism. But he couldn’t figure out how he did it.

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He said he had no memory of having seen the Herald story, describing himself as “absolutely sure” he did not see it before sending his own story to Beast editors. But that memory must be wrong, he said, because the similarities between the two pieces are too great, and the Herald’s storywas posted before he e-mailed his to his editors at 2:03 a.m. on Feb. 2.

“I must have had the Miami Herald there and copied.” He regards the subtle differences between his copy and the Herald’s as evidence of him “doing the rewrite” of what he thought was his copy.

Posner is no stranger to the story he plagiarized, having covered elements of it for his 2009 book Miami Babylon: Crime Wealth and Power—A Dispatch From the Beach. He has continued to gather material on it for the book’s upcoming paperback edition. Citing primary documents in his possession and his own original reporting, he said that he didn’t have to plagiarize the Herald to write his Beaststory.

But, again, he’s not making excuses. He also refused to soft-pedal in any way what he did because it was inadvertent, as many plagiarists do. “The act is the act,” he said.

Posner said he’s always been tough on plagiarists and has long believed that people who get caught taking other people’s copy should say this: “I am humbled by it, and it will not happen again.”

“There is no excuse,” he said, repeatedly expressing his regret. “I take full responsibility.”

According to Felsenthal, Posner will continue to write for the Beast.

“I’m convinced this was an unintentional aberration in an extraordinary career breaking news and doing top quality journalism with high ethical standards,” Felsenthal said.

Addendum, Feb. 6: A sixth sentence lifted from the Herald article by Posner has been called to my attention:

“Because her husband left her his estate, she is now free to sell his assets, including their home, his boat and his massive collection of Batman memorabilia.” —Miami Herald“Because her husband left her his estate, Narcy is now free to sell his assets, including their home, his yacht, and his massive collection of Batman memorabilia.” —The Daily Beast

Addendum, Feb. 6: The seventh sentence lifted by Posner from the Herald:

“Neither Abad nor her mother attended Monday’s hearing in Fort Lauderdale.” —Miami Herald“Neither Abad nor her mother attended Monday’s hearing in Fort Lauderdale.”  —The Daily Beast

Follow That Story! See “More Posner Plagiarism” and “The Posner Plagiarism Perplex.”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/02/making-sense-of-the-blog-statement-by-former-daily-beast-reporter-gerald-posner.html

The Posner Plagiarism Perplex

What to make of Gerald Posner’s blog statement.

By JACK SHAFER

FEB 11, 20105:52 PM

Yesterday, Feb. 10, the Daily Beast dismissed its chief investigative reporter, Gerald Posner, for lifting the work of other journalists.

Posner’s discharge came promptly after two Slate reports by me—Feb. 5 and Feb. 8—detailed his plagiarism in five Daily Beast articles. (I originally learned of Posner’s pilfering from a reader tip.) According to Daily Beast Executive Editor Edward Felsenthal, an in-house review of Posner’s work has turned up “additional examples of copied and unattributed material.”

Not to press my foot on the windpipe of a disgraced journalist, but Posner’s explanations invite further discussion of his transgression.

As I reported in my Feb. 5 piece, Posner said he could not recall how passages from a Miami Herald story had found their way into his article—but he did not dispute the charge that he had plagiarized. In a Feb. 10 blog statement, Posner tells more about how he “inadvertently” plagiarized other publications. The Web and the electronic research files he amassed made him do it. He writes:

The core of my problem was in shifting from that of a book writer—with two years or more on a project—to what I describe as the “warp speed of the net.” For the Beast articles, I created master electronic files, which contained all the information I developed about a topic—that included interviews, scanned documents, published articles, and public information. I often had master files that were 15,000 words, that needed to be cut into a story of 1,000 to 1500 words.In the compressed deadlines of the Beast, it now seems certain that those master file[s] were a recipe for disaster for me. It allowed already published sources to get through to a number of my final and in the quick turnaround I then obviously lost sight of the fact that it belonged to a published source instead of being something I wrote.

As one who has been working at the warp speed of the Net since 1996, who routinely gathers Nexis dumps, clipped Web pages, scanned documents, handwritten notebooks, recorded interviews, DVRed news shows, hard-cover books bristling with Post-It notes, and nests of newspaper clippings fit for the incubation of Layson albatross eggs, I don’t buy it. In recent years, I’ve written upward of 120 pieces annually, and my harder-working Slate colleagues—John Dickerson, Christopher Beam, Emily Bazelon, Timothy Noah, William Saletan, Dahlia Lithwick, Farhad Manjoo, et al.—have posted similar or higher numbers while writing on deadline. None of them has plagiarized. Nor have I.

Posner makes another claim in his statement that cannot go unchallenged. He writes:

Clearly, if I were a serial plagiarizer, I would have scanned my own drafts with such [plagiarism detection] software before submitting to the Beast.

But examples of plagiarized stories found by me and Slatereaders establish that Posner is a serial plagiarist! Of that there is no dispute! That he didn’t scan his drafts with software before submitting them to the Daily Beast doesn’t prove he isn’t a serial plagiarist.

Via e-mail, Slate reader Michael Clark ridicules Posner’s “assertion that if he were a serial plagiarizer (ehem, he is) then he’d have done it more effectively/cleverly. Another one of those strictly unnecessary claims that you hear all the time from plagiarists. It’s one of the most laughable, in fact, since plagiarists are not clever or they’d be doing their own work.”

Next in his blog, Posner tenders what I call the “banality of plagiarism” defense, which the New Republic’s Ruth Shalit unfurled in 1995 when she was caught plagiarizing. (She, too, blamed her plagiarism on sloppy work methods.) Of the copy she lifted, Shalit told the Washington Post’s Frank Ahrens, “They were very banal sentences.” Banal, but good enough to steal.

Posner strikes a similar pose in his statement:

[T]he material copied—facts, figures, the most mundane information, not great prose from another writer—is yet further evidence that my focus was on breaking news, but not enough focus unfortunately on the background information in the articles.

Again, you don’t have to rob from Proust to qualify as a low-down plagiarist. Even mundane information takes time and energy to collect and type up—sometimes more time and energy than it takes to toss off an original sonnet.

In an essay published by Media Ethics (fall 2006), Edward Wasserman attacks the wrong of plagiarism at its roots. Most everybody concedes that plagiarism harms plagiarized writers by denying them due credit for original work. But Wasserman delineates the harm done to readers. By concealing the true source of information, plagiarists deny “the public insight into how key facts come to light”and undermines the efforts of other journalists and readers to assess the truth value of the (embezzled) journalistic accounts. In Wasserman’s view, plagiarism violates the very “truth-seeking and truth-telling” mission of journalism.

From the dissembling fog that is his blog statement, Posner reaches out to apologize to his readers, acknowledge that he “shortcut” his “own rigorous standards,” and admit that he violated “the basic rules of journalism.” Of the writers he stole from Posner says nothing. How many such writers are there? The count is still live. Yesterday, Slate reader Gregory Gelembiuk, who helped me build the Posner plagiarism dossier, 

sent me this previously unnoted example from the Daily Beast in which Posner lifts from the Associated Press.