Regret the Error

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 a Civil Right, Not Good for Children,” by Richard Baer, of Cornell University, should have been referenced in last Sunday’s In My Opinion. The Perspective section piece, “People Must Rule on Same-sex Unions,” supported an amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution that would ban gay marriage, defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

Pijanowski kindly tracked down both the offending comment piece and the work it copied. Roughly a third of the News comment piece was plagiarized from Baer’s work, yet the paper declined to run a proper apology or even use the dreaded “P” word. But this was clearly a case of theft.

“Now, as a news editor at Newsday, I spent six months in the Viewpoints section, where part of my job was to weed out the freelance and submitted opinion pieces for accuracy and other issues,” Pijanowski wrote in an email. “I know how hard it was to spot plagiarism before publication, especially in the days prior to Google. But this should have been rather easy to uncover. ”

It’s not the first example I’ve seen of plagiarism in a contributed comment piece. A prolific letter writer to the Philadelphia Daily News was given the opportunity write an op-ed and he ended up plagiarizing the vast majority of his contribution. A Philadelphia city official also committed plagiarism in a comment piece, and who can forget the serial plagiarism committed by a now former White House adviser who contributed columns to his local paper.

All this to say a five minute check on Google can go a long way.