With all the current talk about "truthiness" (thank you Steven Colbert), the "post-truth campaign" (a la Paul Krugman), "medium lies" (most recently enumerated by The Guardian's Bob Garfield), and the ubiquity of "Bullshit" (that great little book by the eminent philosopher Harry Frankfurt), I can't help but recall my infamous Congressman from Indiana, Earl Landgrebe, who at the height of the Watergate hearings in 1974 uttered that memorable but terrifying message, "Don't confuse me with the facts."

Now clearly I know that empirical fact, truth, and reality are problematics continually debated and discussed in our field and across academic disciplines. And  I do  appreciate the clever  wisdom  of  Felix S. Cohen, the legal scholar who  famously  wrote (truth be known I can't find it in an original reference, just repeated over and over again on the internet)  "Generally the theories we believe we call facts, and the facts we disbelieve we call theories. "

But, when many universities are admitting to altering the facts to assure higher international rankings of their programs (most recently, but certainly not uniquely, Emory University's dean of admissions admitted  that for over ten years the university had submitted false data about college admission test scores and class placement in order to gain an edge in the ubiquitous and obviously vicious academic ranking  wars), something is wrong.  When politicians, such as German defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg and South Korea's National Assembly and International Olympic Committee member  Dae Sung Moon are forced to resign over plagiarized PhD theses, and other high profile plagiarism cases are met with apologies for a "journalistic lapse"  such as that by  Fareed Zakaria or "sloppy note-taking" from  historian  Doris Kearns Goodwin, we need to question whether we are  becoming a culture where, as Frankfurt says  "freedom from the constraints of truth" is increasingly common (Frankfurt, 2005, p. 13). Just this week in the 27 September 2012 issue of Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan calls those who accuse him of plagiarism "wussies" and says in the interview that in songwriting, "You make everything yours. We all do it." All this is to say that the time has come for us to directly confront the issue of plagiarism and journal publication, the problem which ICA has been talking about quietly for many years.

As an academic association whose missions include "to provide an international forum to enable the development, conduct, and evaluation of communication research" and "to sustain a program of high quality scholarly publication and knowledge exchange," it is essential that we specify and clarify our stand on the facts, fuzziness of concepts, fraudulent claims and fundamental principles of ethical communication in publication. And this is exactly what the 2012 -2013 publication committee, working closely with ICA journal editors, is doing.

We are seeking as an organization to develop and establish better ways to help inform and support our colleagues, from beginning graduate students to senior faculty on issues such as what we as a field consider plagiarism (for example: is there such a thing as self plagiarism?), how should we (and who is the we) go about detecting the fact of plagiarism (processes themselves wrought with ethical issues), and what should we do about it when it happens.   As the committee addresses these issues, the many challenges of working in international organizations will come to the fore.

Why is it, for example, that the German defense minister is forced to resign, but after a month's suspension from Time Magazine and CNN, cosmopolitan Fareed Zakaria has returned  to his previous position — credibility seemingly intact?  Astoundingly (at least to me!), Doris Kearns Goodwin received a prestigious American literary prize right after her "sloppy note taking” episode.  Is it differences in culture, national values, organizational sector, gender, status, context, or type of publication that made a difference? How should we as an international organization address differences in experience, perceptions, opportunities, standards, expectations, etc.?  The pressures to publish quickly and often make short cuts more appealing. Numerous questions confront us: Is it ethical to publish multiple articles using the same exact review of literature and methods section? Is it the fault of a faculty author if his or her research assistant plagiarizes a section of the paper and the first author is unaware? Is public shaming the way to deter plagiarism or should more serious sanctions be in place? Should sanctions take into account what the consequences are for individual scholars (losing face, losing one's position, or having to leave a country, are very different outcomes for the same act).  These and many other issues will have to be confronted by our publication committee.

Across the globe, conferences, forums and workshops addressing plagiarism are taking place.  Many focus on the social software being developed to detect plagiarism, others on the social conditions that encourage plagiarism, some on the ways that technology fosters plagiarism (see http://plagiarismconference.org/conference-programme;http://pan.webis.de/). We as an academic community need to address these issues now.

In the August ICA Newsletter I wrote "Our legitimacy as the premier academic  international communication organization is well established, but to uphold our commitment to advance the scholarly study of human communication worldwide we must be responsive to technological developments and  the global changes in the relationship between academic institutions and society at large." The ICA initiative on plagiarism is just one of the many where our colleagues are working hard to meet the goals and promise of ICA.   I thank the committee chair Frank Esser and the committee members Bob Craig, Jake Harwood, Sun Sun Lim, and Jonathan Sterne, for  this important effort  and look forward to  their recommendations. If you have any ideas or concerns for the committee, please contact me or the committee chair, Frank Esser.

Frankfurt, H. (2005) On Bullshit. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press.