Lizzie Crocker, a reporter for The Daily Beast, has resigned after getting caught blatantly plagiarizing an article from The Weekly Standard.
Crocker, a veteran reporter for the outlet, appears to have copied and pasted multiple paragraphs from Alice Lloyd’s article for the Standard. Both articles focused on Kate Roiphe, a writer who stirred controversy by reportedly drafting a piece naming the author of the “Shitty Men In Media” list of male journalists rumored to have engaged in sexual misconduct. The list, which contained dozens of anonymous allegations, was never published in full but circulated among journalists.
Thomas Williams, a writer for New York Times magazine, first pointed out the identical paragraphs in a series of tweets on Sunday.
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
the entirety of the rest of the @weeklystandard piece is lifted after that. it takes time to write things. and to think up your own turns of phrase/construct an argument.
— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) January 13, 2018
“As The Daily Beast’s Code of Ethics and Standards makes clear – and our newsroom understands – plagiarism is unacceptable. When we became aware of this incident on Saturday, we took swift and decisive action to verify the extent of the plagiarism, and deleted the article with an editors’ note. Lizzie Crocker has offered to resign and her resignation was accepted,” Daily Beast editor in chief John Avlon said in a statement to The Daily Caller.
“A larger investigation of her work at The Beast has revealed no other incidents of plagiarism. But one incident is enough. Though this was a difficult decision, we take plagiarism seriously, and will not allow the hard-earned trust we’ve built with our millions of loyal readers to be compromised,” Avlon said.
