[4] In 2019, she received widespread criticism from journalists after her book Merchants Of Truth was found to contain plagiarized passages and numerous factual errors.

[12] On June 2, 2011, Abramson became the executive editor of the Times, replacing Bill Keller who stepped down from the position to become a full-time writer.

[25] In June 2014, it was announced that Abramson had joined the English department at Harvard, and would teach classes on writing narrative nonfiction.

[26] During the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Abramson argued in a column for Guardian US that Hillary Clinton, whom she had covered as a reporter and editor since the Whitewater controversy, was "fundamentally honest and trustworthy.

[28] Abramson indicated that her reporting was initiated by an article by the journalist Marcia Coyle from 2016 when Abramson stated, "Tipped to the post by a Maryland legal source who knew Smith (who made the allegations), Marcia Coyle, a highly regarded and scrupulously nonideological Supreme Court reporter for The National Law Journal, wrote a detailed story about (Moira) Smith's allegation of butt-squeezing, which included corroboration from Smith's roommates at the time of the dinner and from her former husband.

[28] In December 2018, Fox News reported that Abramson's book Merchants of Truth criticized her former employer the Times for abandoning objectivity and becoming "anti-Trump" to bolster profits.

[29] Abramson responded by stating that the Fox News review "distorts and takes what I wrote totally out of context" and praised the Times along with The Washington Post for their "superb coverage of the corruption enveloping the Trump administration, the best investigative reporting I've seen.

"[30] In February 2019, Vice News correspondent Michael C. Moynihan said Abramson's book Merchants of Truth contained several instances of plagiarism, posting a series of tweets comparing passages of the book to passages of other publications, including Time Out, The Ryerson Review of Journalism, The New Yorker, The Columbia Journalism Review, and other works.

[31][32][33] In a February 7 interview on Fox News, Abramson said she had no comment on the plagiarism accusations, but later that evening said she would review the passages in question.

[34][35] However, in an interview with NPR's Michel Martin, Abramson admitted that she "fell short" in attributing her sources for some passages of the book.

Suffering a broken arm and back injuries, she was airlifted to Billings, Montana for corrective surgery, which resulted in a full recovery.

However, although she worked at The Wall Street Journal for 10 years, she elected to not be similarly marked by that newspaper because "It just wasn't in my family's blood.