The Daily Beast (Credit: Daily Beast/Facebook)
Daily Beast reporter Lizzie Crocker resigned last month after being busted for plagiarism. Now, the Daily Beast has deleted at least six of her articles and replaced them with editor’s notes stating the articles broke the news site’s ethics and standards code.
Crocker’s Jan. 12 article, “How Katie Roiphe Became Feminism’s Nemesis-In-Chief,” has been replaced with a note reading, “Editors’ Note: The story published about author Katie Roiphe violated The Daily Beast’s Code of Ethics and Standards and has been removed.”
iMediaEthics wrote to the Daily Beast to ask how many articles have been replaced by editor’s notes, and if they are all because of plagiarism. iMediaEthics received a statement from editor John Avlon explaining:
“As The Daily Beast’s Code of Ethics and Standards makes clear – and our newsroom understands – plagiarism is unacceptable. When we first became aware of Lizzie Crocker’s plagiarism, we deleted the article in question with an editors’ note. Crocker offered to resign and her resignation was accepted. When further instances of plagiarism emerged, those stories were deleted as well. A larger investigation of her work at The Beast is underway. We take plagiarism seriously, and will not allow the hard-earned trust we’ve built with our millions of loyal readers to be compromised.”
New York Times Magazine contributing writer Thomas Chatterton Williams spotted the plagiarism, tweeting side-by-side comparisons of Crocker’s article with the Weekly Standard‘s Alice Lloyd’s article. iMediaEthics has tweeted Crocker.
In addition to Crocker’s article on Roiphe, the Daily Beast has deleted five other stories, iMediaEthics notes:
- Jan. 5, 2018 article, “Is Drinking Collagen Really the Key to Eternal Youth?”
- Dec. 22, 2017 article, “How Models like Emily Ratajkowski sell sex, feminism, and themselves”
- Dec. 17, 2017 article, “The 97 Men (and One Woman) Taken Down by the #MeToo Movement”
- Dec. 2, 2017 article, “Now We Can See the Real Matt Lauer.”
- Nov. 19, 2017 article, “What happens when you like, or even love, a sexual harasser.”
this whole harpers/roiphe controversy is exposing all kinds of problems in contemporary journalism. i'm reading @nymtwit's @thedailybeast piece jan 12 piece and she just straight up copy and pasted (in red) @aliceblloyd's exact wording in a Jan 11 piece in the @weeklystandard. pic.twitter.com/qbYMQ4eKDM
— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) January 13, 2018
this is actually incredible. had to step away and returned to the article to see another graph lifted entirely word for word. am i missing something? does the @thedailybeast have a content licensing deal with the @weeklystandard? pic.twitter.com/NaUycpnTRf
— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) January 13, 2018
this graph too–this is bold! i hope @aliceblloyd is getting a paycheck twice. pic.twitter.com/o624NArKVK
— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) January 13, 2018
Hypothesis: @nymtwit felt free to copy @aliceblloyd bc she could safely assume few readers look across ideological lines, a @thedailybeast reader is unlikely to check the @weeklystandard. All stay hunkered down, but the irony is that the same exact piece can work in either venue!
— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) January 14, 2018
Crocker’s LinkedIn says that she started working for the Daily Beast in 2011.
Crocker hasn’t tweeted since before her resignation. iMediaEthics has tweeted her for her response to the editor’s notes and plagiarism accusations.
Hat Tip: Alex Griswol
This is a start. I’m guessing writer is an intern? But she needs to go back and ask Daily Beast the source — the original material –that was plagiarized. The original pubs would like to know this too. That’s part of the ethics thing. A journalism prof will back you up. Also ask when Daily Beast expects to finish its review.