How Journalism Works A fascinating piece by David Kirkpatrick in today's Times on Mitt Romney's relationship with his dad, George W. Romney. But as I read it, I couldn't help but feel that I'd read parts of it before.

Then I realized that the reason for that was because I'd written parts of it!


In a handful of details, written in consecutive paragraphs, the Times simply lifted my reporting.

Below, in Roman type, here's what the Times writes today, and in italics, what I wrote in the spring 2007 issue of 02138:

At Harvard, Mitt Romney carried an old leather brief case bearing his father’s initials, GWR...

“He only had one thing that was even possibly an affectation,” says Phillips. “He carried his dad’s briefcase with him everywhere he went. It was brown leather, totally scratched and scuffed, the initials ‘GWR’ in gold in the middle. It looked like it had been through World War I and World War II and the Cold War. It was the only sign he gave of a link to being from a politically or economically privileged family…”

....and wrote a seminar paper on a car maker and its dealerships — an issue his father had faced.

As we spoke, [professor emeritus Detlev] Vagts walked over to a file cabinet and pulled out a 30-year-old folder—papers from the seminar Vagts taught, “Law and Business Problems.” Romney’s was still there. Titled “Dual-Distribution in the Automobile Industry,” the paper considered the practice by which manufacturers sell products through both company channels and independent distributors.

Later, Mr. Romney arranged a private meeting for his father with William F. Weld, then governor of Massachusetts.

George Romney talked about volunteerism — a personal passion — for an hour, but his son’s reaction is all Mr. Weld remembers. “He sat there hunched forward a bit with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands just beaming at his father from a distance of two or maybe three feet,” Mr. Weld recalled. “It was undiluted hero worship.”

“His father’s a complete lodestar for him,” says former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld. In early 1995, Romney brought his father to visit then-Governor Weld; George Romney wanted to talk about volunteerism, a longtime cause. “I was sitting behind the desk that later became Mitt’s desk, and George talked for a solid hour,” Weld says. “Mitt was just sitting there looking at his father, just beaming the whole time. He didn’t say a word, he was so proud.”

Well, at least Kirkpatrick did enough work after reading my story to call up Bill Weld and get his own quote.

It's a small point, but this lack of credit-giving is typical of the arrogance of the Times: When you lift three consecutive, highly specific facts from another piece, idiosyncratic facts that haven't been reported elsewhere—and then you write them in consecutive paragraphs—you really ought to say, according to a profile of Romney in the magazine 02138.

Why don't Times reporters follow that basic practice? Two reasons. One, they're arrogant and don't think they have to. And two, they want you to think that they did all the reporting.

In the pre-blog era, they could get away with this stuff....  ¶ 7:41 AM