Bethune on Roberts
Maclean’s books columnist Brian Bethune has posted a blog entry on the Paul William Roberts plagiarism controversy. (Quick recap: a few passages in Roberts’ book A War Against Truth were found to have been lifted from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Publisher Raincoast has stopped shipment of the book and will likely include an apologetic insert in future shipments.)
To begin, Bethune outlines in some detail a previous instance of plagiarism in a story Roberts wrote for The Globe and Mail last spring – a case that the Globe, strangely, left unmentioned in its own coverage of the War Against Truth flap. The Globe also gets points for appending the most baffling, unclear “clarification” imaginable to the Roberts piece in question.
It gets interesting when Bethune links the case to last fall’s Ian McEwan controversy:
A horde of big-name peers rallied to [McEwan’s] cause, fellow lords of creation who adhere to the novelist’s first article of faith: we have the right to utilize as we wish the scribblings of lesser mortals (i.e. non-fiction writers), just as we have the right to play with the lives of real people (at least those who are safely dead and unable to establish lucrative relationships with libel lawyers).
Roberts won’t find nearly as many supporters, Bethune suggests; after all, Roberts is “a non-fiction writer too, and – like the rest of us – he’s no Ian McEwan.”
