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 [...]
November 13, 2007 – 8:00 am
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 [...]
November 13, 2007 – 8:00 am
Talk about burying the lead.
After spending the majority of his column chastising a television station and newspaper for lifting material from his paper, San Antonio Express-News public editor Bob Richter finally gets around to the real news: his paper recently fired a sports reporter for committing plagiarism.
…veteran E-N sports staffer Harry Page was terminated last [...]
November 9, 2007 – 8:00 am
A columnist at the Brown Daily Herald, a student newspaper, has been fired after editors discovered that six of his columns included plagiarized material. The same writer also plagiarized in a letter to the editor that was recently published in the New York Times. The Times published an Editor’s Note yesterday, and the student paper [...]
October 26, 2007 – 6:00 am
Blair J. Parker, a sports reporter at the News Leader in Staunton, Virginia, was fired on Tuesday after an internal investigation revealed she “fabricated at least four stories and plagiarized from other stories on the Internet.”
Parker was suspended last week after a story she wrote was revealed to have been made up of parts plagiarized [...]
August 21, 2007 – 8:00 am
A short introduction to an article about Russian oligarchs included three paragraphs that were substantially similar to paragraphs contained in the introduction to another, earlier, article, published in May, in the Exile - an English-language newspaper based in Moscow. We should not have used material from the Exile in our introduction without quoting and crediting [...]
August 21, 2007 – 8:00 am
Romenesko spotted a strange case of “self-plagiarism” yesterday: a reporter for the Explorer, weekly paper in Arizona, was fired after he/she was found to have taken a story written for a journalism class and, with a few minor updates, passed it off as new work. Aside from the dishonesty, one of the problems was that [...]
Some portions of an article about Hollywood romantic comedies (Boy meets girl: it always ends in tears, Screen, May 10) should have been attributed to Joe Neumaier in a New York Daily News article on the same subject from January 28, 2007.
We regret the error Link
And Joe Neumaier agrees this is plagiarism. He contacted the [...]
