Google Book Search helps find potential plagiarism

I appear to have found evidence of plagiarism of a 2005 copying from a 1995 without proper attribution -- but I can't tell with absolute certainty until I open the 1995 book. For now I am trusting Google Books. [See update at bottom from the 1995 author.]

While reading an article by Jane Singer in a 1998 issue of the Journal of Computer Mediated Communications online, I found a reference to Michael Schudson's 1995 book The Power of News. I have read Schudson's Discovering the News (1978), a slim book I consider essential for anyone interested in, as the subtitle states, a "social history of American newspapers." The trouble is that there aren't many places I can get it; it is not in electronic form, and BN.com does not indicate that its local stores have it.  It's only at one place near me -- the Boston Public Library, Central Book Delivery. Which means I can go downtown today in the rain and get it, or go tomorrow on my way home from work, or just search around the Internet for some clues about what's in the book. The book is actually an anthology of essays, and perhaps one of the essays I am looking for is in essay form somewhere else online.

Searching for the book title itself, I found that Meryl Aldridge of the University of Nottingham reviewed the book in 1997. In the paragraph related to the part I am interested in, she includes a direct quote from Schudson:

On the one hand there is no hint that within the study of culture - the field with which he allies himself in the introduction - the relationship between reader and text has been one of the defining issues. Instead he is humorously empirical: "As it happens, not long ago people did listen to literally hours of political addresses ... at antiwar rallies in the 1960s ... I can say from personal experience that there is a big difference between attending a rally and actually listening to the speeches." (p.l91).

I did a search on text from the quote and found a book called Mediamaking, by Lawrence Grossberg, Ellen Wartella, D. Charles Whitney. This passage is indeed present-- but without direct quotes.

As it happens, not long ago people did listen to literally hours of political addresses, interspersed with music, at antiwar rallies in the 1960s. If it is any measure, we can say from personal experience that there is a big difference between attending a rally and actually listening to the speeches.

I did another search on "As it happens, not long ago", a phrase which only appears in 4 other books in Google's Book index. One of them is in Schudson's essay reprinted in a 1999 anthology, Habermas and the Public Sphere. So it appears that Grossberg, Wartella have copied Schudson's words and replaced "I" with "we", claiming the same personal experience in the same words. I suppose one explanation is that one of the book's authors took notes from Schudson (the very next paragraph cites him: "Schudson (1995) notes further...") and another of the book's author confused this for their original content. [I will reserve this space for an explanation from the authors.]

I don't mean to make these charges lightly. But where I else would I air them?

Google Book Search invites users to write a review for books. I do not have a review in mind; I have a question, or rather, a challenge for the authors. In theory, today's tech-hip authors should keep an open forum for answering challenges to their books. In practice, there's little incentive for an author or publisher to put much effort into this. One such example is John Battelle for a book he wrote about Google. I am not a professional scholar, but I felt duty-bound to challenge Battelle after finding numerous problems with his chapter on Google News. Maybe if Google Book Search orchestrated such a forum, authors would be more compelled to respond.

Mostly, I really want to speak to someone familiar with The Power of News, to decided whether it's worth it to haul over to the BPL to read the book. (I will email Schudson now).

UPDATE 6:20pm: Michael Schudson responds:

Thanks for this. I was not aware of it. As it happens, I know all 3 of the MEDIAMAKING authors and two of them have been good friends for many years. So I will take this to be, as you say, a minor transgression that I am not going to worry about. In the world of cut-and-paste research and writing, I expect such things happen more and more often -- in fact, I have worried
more than once about whether I have been guilty about it myself. (I was reading page proofs of a new article last week and found that I had reproduced a string of maybe 8 words verbatim from a New York Times article. The words were pedestrian, words identifying a quoted source, not words that demonstrated anything about the reporter's views, style, anything. Still, it was an inappropriate borrowing and I changed it....but I wonder how many others of the sort I have missed.)

UPDATE Monday: D. Charles Whitney also responded via email: