Gerald Posner - Plagiarism and Alleged Quote Falsification

Plagiarism and Alleged Quote Falsification

Posner was the chief investigative reporter at the Daily Beast. Following the revelation that a number of Posner's stories for the Beast contained portions plagiarized from articles in other publications, Posner resigned from the Beast. According to Posner, the plagiarism was inadvertent and the result of the "compressed deadlines" of the Beast and confusing his assembled research with his own writing in the "master files" he assembled on each story. Allegations of plagiarism also surfaced concerning his latest book, Miami Babylon (October 2009). Posner said the Miami Babylon plagiarism occurred because of a new system of “trailing endnotes”, because an individual he interviewed read one of the plagiarized sources and reiterated it during the interview, and because he mistook other people’s writing for his own after scanning source documents into a computer database. The Miami New Times also found that Posner “seems to add, subtract, or misattribute quotes” and displayed a series of such “apparently altered or misattributed quotes”. For all the examples shown, Posner cited a source article, where an examination of the source showed that the quote given in Posner’s writing was either substantially altered (e.g. words added), never said by the subject, misattributed, or used out of context.

Gerald Posner subsequently hired attorney Mark Lane, threatening litigation against the Miami New Times on grounds of tortious interference (i.e. that its investigation and reporting of this case damaged Posner’s business relationship with his publishers) and emotional distress. In a press release, Posner stated "Although I'm convinced Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy, I've always believed that had Mark Lane represented Oswald, he would have won an acquittal. That's why Mark Lane was the obvious choice as my own attorney." Soon thereafter, the Miami New Times published evidence of additional plagiarism from multiple sources in both Secrets of the Kingdom and Why America Slept. According to Poynter Institute senior scholar Roy Peter Clark, "This constitutes plagiarism by any definition I can think of....The capturing of someone else's material that is this extensive cannot, in my opinion, have been done accidentally." Evidence was also presented indicating that Posner had repeatedly “scrubbed” elements of the journalism scandal from his Wikipedia page. According to Posner, the media reports detailing his journalistic transgressions were actually the result of a "coordinated effort" to "discredit my book Miami Babylon" because of the book's "unvarnished and investigative history".