Kena Betancur/Reuters
Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson reportedly admitted that some passages in her new book, Merchants of Truth, were “too close” to the original texts she sourced from after facing allegations of plagiarism. “The language is too close in some cases and should have been cited as quotations in the text,” she told The Wall Street Journal in a statement. Abramson vowed to “promptly fix these footnotes and quotations as I have corrected other material that Vice contested.” “All of the ideas in the book are original, all the opinions are mine,” she added. “The passages in question involve facts that should have been perfectly cited in my footnotes and weren’t.”
On Twitter Wednesday, Abramson was publicly accused of lifting reporting from articles in the New Yorker and Time Out in her book. According to the Journal, Abramson failed to credit either publication in her book—although the New Yorker article was reportedly “mentioned at some point in the book footnotes.” CNN later revealed two more instances of apparent plagiarism in her book, this time lifting reporting from Newsweek and Politico. Publisher Simon & Schuster said Abramson’s book was “exhaustively researched and meticulously sourced,” but told the newspaper it would be ready to revise the text if necessary. “I was up all night going through my book because I take these claims of plagiarism so seriously,” Abramson said in her statement.