I said that there was something I didn’t like the smell of in the AP’s article about Holocaust denier David Irving’s arrest in Austria. My suspicions were confirmed by a reader’s email:
AP says the case was “dismissed.” In its usual usage, “dismissed” carries an implication that the case was dropped, or ordered dropped, by the court in the middle of the process, and that no final verdict was issued. In fact, Irving v. Lipstadt did go all the way to a verdict. The judge ruled against Irving on all significant points, said basically that everything Lipstadt said about him was true, that he indeed was a racist, anti-semite, and holocaust-denier. The judge also ordered him to pay the court costs of the suit. That was no slap on the wrist either — the “court costs” amounted to around 2 million pounds, about $3M dollars at the then-current rate of exchange. If Irving isn’t still paying those costs, it’s only because he did something underhanded to avoid it.
So I started digging around and reading a little background on the lawsuit. The AP could not have gotten their story more wrong. Where, I wondered, were they quoting from? Was it possible they were quoting from Irving himself? I checked. Irving’s site actually tells the truth about the lawsuit, and says he lost.
On the other hand, this archived New York Times article, which has since been corrected, has language that is nearly identical to the AP’s. The Times (you can find a free excerpt here) wrote:
Mr. Irving, a British writer, sued Professor Lipstadt for libel for calling him a Holocaust denier, but the British Royal High Court of Justice dismissed the lawsuit on April 11, 2000, concluding that Mr. Irving was anti-Semitic and racist and that he persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence.
The AP wrote:
Irving once sued Lipstadt for libel for calling him a Holocaust denier, but his lawsuit was dismissed in 2000 by a British court, which ruled that Irving was anti-Semitic and racist and misrepresented historical information.
You know, change a word here, a phrase there, and you have nearly the exact same sentence. Interesting.
But the AP seems to have missed the New York Times correction, which is on the TimesSelect Archive page for the article.
Correction: March 23, 2005, Wednesday An article on Friday about C-Span’s plans to broadcast a speech by David Irving, who has argued that Hitler was not fully responsible for the mass murder of Jews, referred incorrectly to the disposition of a libel suit he filed against Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of Holocaust studies at Emory University, for calling him a Holocaust denier. The British High Court found for Professor Lipstadt; the case was not dismissed.
I can understand making that mistake if, say, you weren’t relying on an old – and incorrect – New York Times article for your main information. Perhaps some of my readers have TimesSelect and can send me a full copy of the article. I wonder if the AP writer didn’t grab a few more handy sentences from the article.
Is plagiarism a new AP policy?
I think I see the mistake that they made. In many cases, finding for the defendant when it is an obvious situation will often mean dimissing the case as totally invalid. Often this will include requiring the plaintiff to pay court costs as well. I think that saying found for Professor Lipstadt might have implied a countersuit which won.
I think that in the original article, the Times made the mistake and the AP used that language because they thought it did not sound as bad for Mr. Irving.
The AP probably has a canned paragraph which is pulled up whenever Irving is mentioned and probably dates from the original Times article. I doubt that they would bother to do any research once the have the canned paragraph.
(ob disclaimer)
I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on TV. This is just the way it appears to me as a layman who reads blogs.
The AP probably looks on plagiarism the way PDQ Bach did. It’s not stealing, it’s recycling.