On May 22, *The Toledo Free Press reports that columnist Maggie Thurber resigned after one of her columns was found to have included plagiarized material. From the story:
Thurber’s column for May 24, “A History of Memorial Day,” was accused by a contributor of SwampBubbles.com of containing plagiarized lines.
Upon learning of the accusation, Toledo Free [...]
Over the weekend, one of our readers pointed out that the “It’s a Snap” user travel Photo of the Week was, in fact, a copyrighted image. We have removed the photograph from our site, as the picture is the property of Scanlan Photography’s “Windows to the World,” viewable at http://www.scanlan.com. Link
A report from the Independent (UK):
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the tweedy Conservative candidate for the new parliamentary seat of North-East Somerset, has been caught red-handed trying to rip off the Sun newspaper in his latest campaign leaflet.
Rees-Mogg – who, as the son of the former Times editor Lord Rees-Mogg, should perhaps know better – admitted that a [...]
February 26, 2009 – 9:31 pm
Barney Gimbel, a writer with Fortune magazine, resigned after being shown evidence that he had plagiarized from an article in the New York Times Magazine. The New York Observer reports that Fortune will publish an apology in its upcoming issue, which is slated to hit newsstands on March 9. The apology:
In our Feb. 2 issue [...]
February 12, 2009 – 8:00 am
An article published on the New York Daily News’ website stole two paragraphs and two quotes from a story published on the front page of the San Antonio Express-News. Bob Richter, the Express-News public editor, described the theft on his blog:
An editor at nydailynews.com, the Web site of the New York Daily News, acknowledged Thursday [...]
December 4, 2008 – 9:27 pm
A report from the Globe And Mail (Sportsnet is a Canadian sports channel and website):
Rogers Sportsnet has pulled NFL commentator Chris Landry off the air and removed his column from Sportsnet.ca following an allegation of plagiarism.
Some of Landry’s columns on Sportsnet.ca have contained word for word passages from Internet pieces written by Mike Lombardi and [...]
Jody Rosen, Slate’s music critic, has written a remarkable story about a weekly paper in Texas that appears to commit plagiarism on a shockingly regular basis.
Rosen’s investigation into the Bulletin, a weekly in Montgomery County, Texas, began after he received an email informing him that his “… profile of musician Jimmy Buffett was reproduced wholesale [...]
Romenesko spotted this apology to readers from the executive editor of the The Daily Herald in Everett, Washington:
On June 3, this newspaper carried a column describing the travails of a girls’ basketball coach. Editors are deeply disturbed to learn that parts of the column were taken from a 2002 piece that appeared in Sports Illustrated.
This [...]
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation airs a wonderful show called Media Watch. It operates with the slogan, “Everyone loves it until they’re on it.” Why, that’s good enough to steal for this site. But that would be unwise because Media Watch is very good at exposing plagiarists.
In early March, it aired a scathing seven minute report [...]
March 21, 2008 – 11:40 am
Jeffrey Pijanowski, a former editor at Newsday, emailed me this week about an incident of plagiarism at the Sunday News, a newspaper in Lancaster, PA. A member of the community submitted a comment piece about same-sex marriage and the paper published on March 2. A week later, the News published a small “correction/clarification”:
“Same-sex Marriage: Not [...]
Jack Shafer brings word of another incident of plagiarism at the New York Times:
New York Times Standards Editor Craig Whitney apologized to Manhattan Media this afternoon after today’s (March 11) Times lifted from a Manhattan Media story published on the Web and e-mailed to a media list yesterday.
The lift, taken from Manhattan Media’s City [...]
Last week, Slate’s Jack Shafer revealed that Times reporter Alexei Barrionuevo had plagiarized part of an article about cheap cocaine in Argentina. (Regret report here.) In response, the Times published an Editors’ Note but declined to detail the action it would take in response to the revelation. I wondered if this meant the Times would [...]
At the end of last week, it emerged that Timothy S. Goeglein, who until his resignation on Friday was the White House aide responsible for working with conservative and Christian groups, had plagiarized in one of his regular guest columns published in the News-Sentinel. Former News-Sentinel columnist Nancy Nall* revealed the plagiarism. From there, it [...]
February 29, 2008 – 12:02 pm
Romenesko spotted this report from the Ventura County Star about a surfing columnist that was fired due to plagiarism:
The weekly column, Surfing Scene, by David Burroughs has been cancelled by the Ventura County Star because of evidence of plagiarism.
Burroughs, who was hired on contract to write the column, acknowledged that material in two of his [...]
February 28, 2008 – 5:41 pm
While preparing a column this week, Slate’s Jack Shafer stumbled upon an incident of plagiarism at the New York Times. Shafer wrote a column about the theft and the Times has now responded with an Editor’s Note:
A front-page article on Saturday described a cocaine epidemic in Argentina fed by the consumption of paco, an addictive [...]
February 14, 2008 – 8:00 am
A correction:
A story about the Broward Sheriff’s Office’s semiannual awards ceremony, which appeared on Page 2B of the Broward edition on Feb. 6, included several paragraphs that should have been attributed to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Details and quotations from the Sun-Sentinel story, including the comments of civilian honoree John Clark, were used in The [...]
February 12, 2008 – 8:00 am
IvyGate and Gawker recently noted a recent incident of plagiarism at the Brown Daily Herald. Here’s the editors note:
Last week, as part of its usual fact-checking process, The Herald discovered that two news articles scheduled for publication contained material taken from other sources’ reporting without quotation or attribution. The articles were never printed. The Herald [...]
January 25, 2008 – 8:00 am
An editor’s note form the New York Press:
It has come to our attention that some of the questions in this week’s debut of the New York Press’s new sex-advice column, “Lip Service,” were taken from past columns by Dan Savage, the nationally-syndicated sex-advice columnist and editor of The Stranger. The author of the column, [...]
January 23, 2008 – 8:00 am
The Torontoist blog recently put up a post noting the similarities between one of its articles and a subsequent one in the Toronto Sun. (Disclosure: I recently joined some of the Torontoist folks on the bloggers team for a broadcast of Test The Nation on CBC.) Some folks took to the comments section to object [...]
January 11, 2008 – 8:00 am
It appears that Radar magazine produces some very enticing content. Last year, a Chilean magazine plagiarized from Radar’s Toxic Bachelors feature. Then, this past Sunday, the London Sunday Times “inadvertently” plagiarized content from a Radar piece, “100 Reasons Why You’re Still Single.” A report from the Guardian:
A piece headlined “50 Reasons Why You’re Still Single” [...]
January 8, 2008 – 8:00 am
John McIntyre, the Baltimore Sun’s assistant managing editor for the copy desk, has written an excellent blog post about plagiarism and fabrication. McIntyre is the language and usage guru at the paper. He uses that knowledge base to offer up a list of ways to spot a plagiarist or fabulist. These should be provided to [...]
January 3, 2008 – 8:00 am
An alert reader pointed us to an apology contained in the Dec 31 issue of the Weekly Standard. The magazine admits that an article by David Satter contained “several passages…taken without attribution from Jonas Bernstein’s articles in the Eurasia Daily Monitor.” The magazine avoids the “p” word, but does include an example of an offending [...]
December 17, 2007 – 8:00 am
An Editor’s Note:
In the Statesman’s Schools column on Wednesday’s Page B2 , the first three paragraphs of an item about school breakfasts were taken nearly verbatim from a news release by the Center for Public Policy Priorities. It is not the American-Statesman’s practice to print items from outside sources verbatim and without proper credit. We [...]
December 11, 2007 – 6:00 am
This is the least enjoyable part of running this site, but we suppose somebody’s got to do it. Herewith, a month-by-month report of instances of plagiarism and fabrication in the press. Of particular note is the high number of incidents of plagiarism at student newspapers this year. A disturbing trend, to be sure.
January
A columnist and [...]
November 20, 2007 – 8:00 am
Our article on Ugandan guards working in Iraq, written for us by a freelance journalist in Uganda, was drawn substantially from an article published previously in Uganda’s Daily Monitor and written by David Herbert. We were, of course, unaware of this. We apologise to Mr Herbert, the Daily Monitor and our readers. Link
This is a [...]
