Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum directly challenged former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson over allegations that portions of her new book, “Merchants of Truth,” were plagiarized.
Toward the end of a wide-ranging interview with Abramson on Wednesday’s “The Story With Martha MacCallum,” MacCallum brought up allegations “just surfacing on Twitter” that some of her book “could be plagiarized.”
The allegations were made Wednesday by Vice News Tonight correspondent Michael Moynihan, who tweeted out several “plagiarized passages” in a thread.
WATCH:
“Michael Moynihan of Vice is writing about this,” MacCallum said. “He goes to a section that Jake Malooley wrote in Vice Cop that talks about Jason Mojica and the paragraphs are very similar in your writing. Do you have any comment on this?”
“I really, I really don’t, uh…” Abramson said, clearly taken aback. (RELATED: VICE News Correspondent Gives Jill Abramson A Verbal Butchering)
MacCallum was likely referring to this tweet by Moynihan:
This passage, on former Vice News editor Jason Mojica, is lifted from a 2010 Time Out magazine piece, with small modifications: https://t.co/csNoONZQhX pic.twitter.com/aiQzwKEStl
— Michael C Moynihan (@mcmoynihan) February 6, 2019
“You are going to be asked to respond to this at some point,” the Fox News host noted before laying out some papers for Abramson to look at. “I put them right in front of you so you have a chance to look at them.”
Here are two more of Moynihan’s examples:
The following examples from the final book—not the galley—are only from the Vice chapters (I didn’t check the others). So let’s begin…Here is Abramson on Gavin McInnes (whom she interviewed) and the Ryerson Review of Journalism https://t.co/hx0XcyZ89k pic.twitter.com/qroN59gyVk
— Michael C Moynihan (@mcmoynihan) February 6, 2019
This paragraph can be sourced to two places: a *masters thesis* and a 2013 New Yorker piece by Lizzie Widdicombe https://t.co/ZWX5RgKxlahttps://t.co/Ux6gdDO9Qg pic.twitter.com/tSIKyRoKDP
— Michael C Moynihan (@mcmoynihan) February 6, 2019
“I certainly didn’t plagiarize in my book,” said the former New York Times editor. “There are 70 pages of footnotes showing, you know, where I got the information.”
When MacCallum offered that perhaps it could be a “footnote issue,” Abramson denied that. “No, I don’t think it’s an issue at all.”
“So you are standing by your work 100 percent?” she asked.
“Yes,” Abramson responded.
Abramson speculated that perhaps the people at Vice took “issue with the book” because they “don’t like the portrayal of Vice.”