Don't distribute unless you attribute.

In a moment of weakness last September, feeling perhaps a little guilty at the lack of accomplishment from NCEW's Ethics Committee, I offered to write a piece on plagiarism, the working title of which was: "Plagiarism: inexcusable or inevitable?"

The offer was not entirely without a news peg. Mike Barnicle, longtime columnist for The Boston Globe, had recently come under criticism for lifting jokes from George Carlin without attribution; both he and another of the Globe's star personalities, Patricia Smith, were ultimately fired for fabricating characters, stories, and quotes. Neither wrote for their editorial page, but their actions raised questions that relate to how editorial writers and columnists do their jobs.

Plagiarism is both inexcusable and inevitable. Original thinking in an editorial is at best a sometime thing. There just aren't that many new ideas, and discovering the few remaining is a time-consuming process.

The result is that we end up disseminating the good ideas of others to our readers, giving those others credit for their ideas usually but not always.

Usually, because we value our personal integrity and institutional credibility, we also give our readers the benefit of the doubt in estimating their level of literacy and expect to get caught if we quote extensively from some well-known authority without using quotation marks or attribution. Not to mention that plagiarism is an offense justifying termination.

Not always, because in a world where communications are instantaneous and the free exchange of ideas is widely practiced, many notions about the way things are and ought to be have become a part of a general body of public knowledge. Scholarship might require that you footnote a reference to the thinker considered the originator of an idea, but footnotes don't do much for editorials.

At its core, this isn't a tough issue. Plagiarism is cheating. Plagiarists are missing an essential character ingredient. Adopting work as yours didn't get you anywhere in school, and it won't in life, either.

That said, it seems to me that a critical aspect of plagiarism that doesn't get talked about much is intent. I think a lot of what gets called plagiarism these days is inadvertent, at best a misdemeanor in a felonious world. There is such a thing as too much attribution.

Suppose that as part of an editorial you quote from a magazine article by an obscure expert in some arcane field. Are you obligated to identify that person by name? If it takes several paragraphs to outline a position taken by a scholar in some journal, must we attribute each and every graph?

Plagiarism implies a willful deception. When that happens, the ax should fall on the deceiver. But if the case involves more misunderstanding than harmful intent, full disclosure - even post-publication - seems an altogether adequate response to a charge that you have usurped someone else's material.

This is a tricky area. Excessive attribution is boring. Our job isn't to tell people how to think; it's to convince them that there are issues affecting their lives that are worth thinking about. The thoughts we have about a given issue and the positions we take aren't to recruit unthinking believers but to get people to question theft own beliefs, if only as means of freshening and strengthening them. Our wisdom can be received; our every thought doesn't have to be original. (Thank God.)

But we need to be credible to have even a fighting chance with this daunting task. We can't be always wrong and still be provocative. We can't steal intellectual property from others, any more than we can steal real property. The act kills credibility. It may also get you some hard time.

All of which still allows for wonder at what Mike Barnicle at The Boston Globe was thinking. But it is to say that beating ourselves up over the issue of plagiarism is for the most part a waste of time. We know what's right and what's wrong. If we're not sure, it's probably wrong. But the webs we weave are not, as a rule, tangled or because we practice to deceive. (Sir Walter Scott, with alterations)

NCEW member John D. Gates is editorial page editor of the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina and chair of NCEW's Ethics Committee. His e-mail address is [e-mail]