Regret the Error

According to a report in yesterday’s New York Daily News, Andy Geller, a reporter at the New York Post, has been suspended for one month after plagiarizing from the New York Times. The suspension was apparently handed down last week, but the Post won’t comment on the News report (nor will the Times), and we can’t locate a Post editor’s note about the incident. So either the News has it wrong, or the Post doesn’t think it needs to inform readers about an incident of plagiarism. As of now it appears to be the latter, which is unacceptable. (According to a Nexis search, Geller’s byline has not appeared in the Post since June 21.) The Post needs to explain what happened and why it took the action it did, in addition to apologizing to its readers and to the Times.
From the News story:

…[Andy] Geller was suspended last week when the Post discovered the plagiarism
in an article he wrote about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s shadowy path toward
terror, published following his death this month.
The Post refused to comment on Geller’s suspension.
"The New York Post will not discuss their internal management issues," Post spokesman Howard Rubenstein said.
A Times spokeswoman declined to comment.
Geller’s piece and The Times article ran the same day, June 9. But The Times article appeared on its Web site the night before.
In recounting Zarqawi’s youth, the two articles shared the same structure, many phrasings and even some of the same quotes.
"He was not so big, but he was bold," both newspapers quoted a cousin as saying.
Both newspapers noted that Zarqawi "strutted around in Afghan dress and
a woolly" hat; and seemed "adrift" in his mid-20s until he became a
journalist, writing about the "battles he had missed."
…

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