This has already been a bad year for plagiarism at student newspapers, but this latest incident, spotted by Romenesko, is very surprising. A professor at the Missouri School of Journalism has lost his column in a university paper staffed by journalism students and faculty after admitting he committed “unintentional” plagiarism. From a story in the paper:
Last Sunday, columnist John Merrill wrote about the MU Women’s and Gender Studies Program. Quotes and other phrases in the column were repeated directly from an Oct. 5 article in The Maneater without crediting that newspaper or the article’s author, Anna Koeppel.
That was wrong.
Missourian policy does not allow any writer to appropriate someone else’s words as his own, even when those words are within quotation marks. In the column, three quotes, and about half a sentence, were taken from Koeppel’s story.
Several journalists and journalism educators I spoke with referred to the use as the ethical equivalent of a misdemeanor, not a felony.
I believe the Missourian, and the School of Journalism, must hold itself to a higher standard.
The newspaper’s policy prohibits “using material from other publications without attribution.”
As such, the Missourian will no longer run columns by Professor Merrill.
Merill says, “I assure you that it was ‘unintentional’ plagiarism, and I had no reason to make it look as if I got these quotes from the sources directly. I was using them as a springboard for my opinion. But I did it, and I’m sorry. Careless, I’ll admit, but not intentional. All these dozens and dozens of columns and some 30 books and innumerable magazine and newspaper articles and never before have I been accused of plagiarism.”
The paper reviewed his last year of columns and found that “none had the same amount of lifted material as the one Sunday; however, there were five more columns in which at least one quote had been taken from other publications without attribution.”
