https://yasminnair.com/the-plagiarism-papers/
I read all of Yasmin Nair's essays about plagiarism in publishing/academia a while ago. What really stood out to me was Nair's discussion of how classist writing as a profession has become.
She goes into some detail in her essay, 'The Corruption of Influence: On Dimes Square, Byline, and the New York Times'. Byline, a supposedly indie publication, doesn't pay its writers. What's striking is when one of the co-founder's of Byline, Megan O'Sullivan, was called out about this online, her response was:
Nair rightly points out that:
O’Sullivan has so completely naturalised the idea that only writing for free can get you gigs in publications that she presents the trajectory of her writing career as completely normal: “Without it, I don’t know that I would have gotten a start.” Which reads as, “I faced exploitative conditions myself therefore I feel justified in exploiting others.” And, for people like her and too many others, this is in fact true but it hasn’t always been the case and, much more importantly, it should not be.
Honestly, Byline is such a good case study for the publishing/journalism industry as a whole. Only upper-middle class (usually) white people can afford to become professional writers these days because there's an expectation in the industry that you work for free (this is also applicable to the UK). Working class writers can't afford to rely on parents whilst doing various unpaid internships, but for upper middle class ones, it's a different story. Until people within the industry accept that writers need to be paid properly - since upper class editors of publications all have the same class based expectations for their subordinates, formed from their own privileged entry into journalism further proliferating the issue - the media will continue to be out of touch due to upper middle class domination.
(Upper middle class overrepresentation, by the why, is probably half the reason why the New York Times Is Like That.)
TLDR - journalism and publishing is dominated by middle-class white people, which leads to myopic writing that can't empathise with the concerns of ordinary working people.
Full credit for the quotes and screenshot go to Yasmin Nair, of course. Read her essays, they're a thorough examination of how plagiarism plagues both publishing and academia. She's got more coming (including one called 'On Claudine Gay and Racism in Academia').
Thanks goes to Current Affairs (socialist magazine run by Nathan J. Robinson, you should read it!) for making me aware of Nair's essays by linking them in one of Nathan's articles (I've forgotten which).
