Romenesko spotted a pretty remarkable report from the Chicago Tribune. (Scroll down for an update.) It reveals that a Fox Sports broadcast showed a series of fake media headlines purportedly about Bears quarterback Jay Cutler and portrayed them as real. From the Trib story: During the fourth quarter of the Bears-Falcons season opener, Fox turned [...]
… Poynter’s Kelly McBride, who regularly gets phone calls from editors seeking advice on how to handle plagiarism/fabrication cases, said she found that more newsrooms started firing staffers for plagiarism following the Blair scandal. That seems to have changed once the economic crisis hit newsrooms. “Some editors these days seem more willing to overlook minor [...]
Jon Krakauer’s Three Cups of Deceit—his thorough, intricate takedown of Greg Mortenson’s fraudulent book and charity—has been downloaded 70,000 times by users of byliner.com. That’s terrific news in more ways than one. The problem is, Mortenson’s first book sold more than four million copies. Math isn’t my strongest suit—that would be my reasoned, measured approach [...]
This site was inaccessible for much of last week due to it being temporarily listed as an attack site by Google. As a result, I missed blogging about a few notable items: A Bad Byline From a report on WQAD.com: The Western Courier is an award-winning newspaper at Western Illinois University that takes pride in [...]
Torontoist exposed a case of localization gone mad in Post City Magazine, which distributes editions in different Toronto neighborhoods. In an misguided effort to make its March cover story hit home with readers, editors altered the lead paragraph to fit the different neighborhood editions, thereby fabricating a scene. The lead graph from the story: Reading [...]
A freelance writer and journalism graduate of Columbia University was caught fabricating sources in a recent piece for the Village Voice.* Here's a note from the paper's editor: Freelance writer Rob Sgobbo's article "For-Profit Blues" was removed from the website after the Voice learned that Sgobbo had invented a character, "Tamicka Bourges," who claimed she [...]
A long and self-critical quote was attributed to Picasso in a column examining the value of this artist's work. However, the interview in which the painter supposedly spoke – saying he did not "consider myself an artist in the ancient sense of the word" – is widely thought by art experts to have been fabricated [...]
Tuesday marked the 30th anniversary of the day these words appeared on a front page of the Sunday Washington Post: "Jimmy is 8 years old and a third-generation heroin addict, a precocious little boy with sandy hair, velvety brown eyes and needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin brown arms. "He nestles in [...]
Washington Post columnist Mike Wise had a point he wanted to make about the declining standards of the media. He made that point in the worst way imaginable: By making up a phony "scoop" and posting it on Twitter. It all started early Monday afternoon, when Wise tweeted that he had been told the NFL [...]
In a column headlined “Women get the worst of stereotyping†(16 August) reference was made to Judith Williamson, the feminist author. Ms Williamson has asked us to make it clear that she has never written any of the statements attributed to her in that column. Our apologies to Ms Williamson. Link Here are the offending [...]
During my recent absence, there were a few notable incidents of plagiarism and fabrication. Here’s a quick round-up: Fabricated interviews. The New Yorker carried a trio of pieces about an Italian journalist caught fabricating a surprisingly large amount of interviews with famous writers. And a German magazine also admitted that it had published a fabricated [...]
It’s a depressing job, but somebody’s got to do it. Below is my annual round-up of the year in plagiarism and fabrication. The good news is that there were fewer incidents than in 2008. Please email me if I’ve missed anything. January None! February New York Daily News reporter Rosemary Black stole two paragraphs and [...]
A “Notice to Readers” on the paper’s website: A Nov. 10 “New Global Indian” online column by New York City freelance writer Mona Sarika has been found to contain information that was plagiarized from several publications, including the Washington Post, Little India, India Today and San Francisco magazine. In the column, “Homeward Bound,” about H-1B [...]
New Brunswick’s Telegraph-Journal continues to atone for an erroneous report from earlier in the summer that set of a scandal in Canada. After apologizing to the prime minister, firing its editor, and suspending its publisher (he’s now back with the paper’s parent company), the paper on Saturday apologized to Monsignor Brian Henneberry for fabricating a [...]
Today the Telegraph-Journal in New Brunswick issued a remarkable front page apology for a report that became a national controversy in Canada. In early July, the paper reported that Prime Minister Stephen Harper had pocketed the communion wafer given to him by a Roman Catholic priest at the funeral of former Governor-General Romeo LeBlanc. That [...]
Kris DeRego, the news editor at Ka Leo, the student paper at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, has been fired after the paper looked through his previous work and found a trail of fabricated sources and factual errors. From the paper’s report: In a review of all stories written for Ka Leo between January [...]
Erwin James is the name used by a convicted murder murderer who writes regularly for the Guardian. (That name is somewhat different from the one he grew up with.) Back in 2006, he wrote an article about his time spent in the French Foreign Legion. Now, three years later, he has admitted to fabricating parts [...]
As noted in this year’s edition of the Crunks, 2008 saw an example of institutional plagiarism (the Bulletin), as well as an incident of institutional fabrication (Mainichi Daily News). Both are mentioned below, along with the rest of this year’s notable examples of plagiarism and fabrication. On the more positive side of things, this year [...]
For many years, the Mainichi Daily News, the English website of Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun, was the place to go if you wanted to read salacious articles about the sexual habits of the Japanese. The stories, which were featured in the site’s “WaiWai” column, frequently stretched believability. Here’s a list of stories published on its [...]
An Editor’s Note: A story on page B1 of the April 5 edition of the Citizen, which looked at the future of NATO, should not have included quotes attributed to Clifford Gaddy, a Russia expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. Mr. Gaddy was not interviewed by the Citizen for that article, and the [...]
The website of German newspaper Der Spiegel recently issued a retraction for an article that claimed IKEA had a habit of naming inexpensive items after Danish towns. (High end items were named after Swedish, Finnish and Norwegian towns.) As the retraction explains, the story was based on a report in a Danish newspaper that turned [...]
This story has already blown up, but here is the official Times Editors’ Note: The Books of The Times review in The Arts on Feb. 26 and an article in House & Home on Thursday described the experiences of Margaret B. Jones, who said that she had been a foster child and gang member in [...]
Roy Greenslade has the background on the above image: This award-winning photograph, showing a herd of endangered Tibetan antelopes apparently undisturbed by a passing train on the controversial Qinghai-Tibet railway, has been exposed as a fake. The image was widely hailed in China as a symbol of harmonious co-existence between man and nature. But photographer [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
