It's official -- Doris Kearns Goodwin is tainted goods. Her plight was perhaps best summarized recently by Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll, who also chairs the board of the Pulitzer Prize. Regarding the board's Tuesday decision to part ways with Goodwin, Carroll said he was prepared to do "whatever was necessary to maintain the highest standard of integrity for the Pulitzer Prize process."
In case you somehow haven't heard it all already, here's how Goodwin was brought so low. Apparently, her book -- The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys -- copied, nearly verbatim and without citation, passages from another author's book. Since then, an avalanche of condemnation has descended on the popular historian, with especially harsh assessments meted out by Timothy Noah in Slate and Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post. Goodwin, for her part, has apologized repeatedly and profusely, maintaining the theft was unintentional, a result of carelessness and poor organization of source materials. Yet each day seems to bring with it a fresh humiliation. The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour asked Goodwin to take a vacation. The University of Delaware canceled her planned commencement speech. And now, the Pulitzer.
If it all seems a bit much, that's because it almost certainly is. What Goodwin did was irresponsible, unprofessional and dumb. But considering the vastness of her book -- 900 pages, 3,500 footnotes -- it's fair to ask how a few unattributed passages (opinion appears divided on the actual number) could acquire such career-wrecking power. There is no proof the theft was intentional, and in this case, intent matters. Accidental plagiarism is something of an oxymoron, after all. Nor is it exactly fair to argue, as Noah does, that Goodwin is getting her just deserts because a "Harvard undergraduate" caught doing the same thing would be punished with suspension. Goodwin's position in no way corresponds to that of a student. Her years of valuable -- and blameless -- scholarly work merit the benefit of the doubt.
The reason she hasn't gotten it ought to be the real story here. The deeper one digs in this mess, the dirtier things look. Online columnist Dennis Loy Johnson mentions in his MobyLives.com piece on Goodwin the emails he's received -- sent from phony Harvard addresses -- tipping him off about her improprieties. In a pro-Goodwin column, The Boston Globe's Thomas Oliphant argues that the accusations are largely baseless, the product of a hatchet-wielding online journalist named Philip Nobile; apparently, Nobile has extended his accusations to other Goodwin books, without much success. Oliphant cites a New York Times piece containing this oddly insinuating sentence: ''No one has publicly accused Ms. Goodwin of copying passages in her other books, including No Ordinary Time." That may be because they don't have to. Nobile is a regular on that editor-free child of web media -- the blog (the common name for web logs). However inadvertently, blogs -- with their soundbite commentary, round-the-clock updates, and open-door policy to posters -- make an ideal breeding ground for character assassins. The most popular ones, like AndrewSullivan.com, have a loyal readership that numbers in the thousands; a couple of choice links and an ax to grind are all that is required to spread innuendo around the web with lightning speed. Sullivan himself has led a character-assassination campaign against New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman that, in its obsessive unfairness, much resembled Nobile's.
Lately, even mainstream print media has blog envy -- check out this piece in Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper. But few media critics have gotten around to dealing with the serious problem of quality control in the increasingly powerful blogging world. The irony, of course, is that in many cases, Goodwin is being hounded by people who are just as shifty with their sources as she was with hers -- probably much more so.
