In late 2007, I wrote a post about an incident of plagiarism at the San Antonio Express-News. I quoted from an article by the paper’s public editor that reported “… veteran E-N sports staffer Harry Page was terminated last week for lifting information — which he presented in his bowling blog as his own — [...]
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 [...]
First, a bit of news: I launched a Regret the Error Facebook page yesterday. It aggregates posts from the site, the What I’m Reading Links over to the right, and my weekly columns for Columbia Journalism Review. Of course, it’s also a place for discussion and sharing links. Go here to check it out and [...]
The New York Times published an editors’ note today revealing that business reporter Zachery Kouwe “reused language from The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and other sources without attribution or acknowledgment.” Here’s the note: In a number of business articles in The Times over the past year, and in posts on the DealBook blog on NYTimes.com, [...]
Acting on a reader tip, Slate’s Jack Shafer busted the Daily Beast’s Gerald Posner for lifting from the Miami Herald: Veteran journalist Gerald Posner acknowledged today that he copied five sentences from a Miami Herald article this week for a piece he wrote for the Daily Beast. The Daily Beast appended an editor’s note to [...]
A letter to the editor that we published Wednesday, “Obama’s speech” submitted by Ron Gardner of Atwater, has been removed from our Web site. The letter was taken almost word for word from a column, “State of the Union: Obama v. Constitution,” by Mark Alexander on the Web site, The Patriot Post. Letters to the [...]
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 [...]
We failed to acknowledge South Africa’s Sunday Times as the source of an article about a passenger on a South African air force flight who was catapulted into the sky when his ejector seat fired. Several passages, including quotes from a South African air force spokesman, a retired South African air force instructor pilot and [...]
I initially didn’t post about this story because it struck me as a tale of well-meaning aggregation gone wrong, but it seems that the issue was bigger than that. The bottom line is that the Hartford Courant has apologized for repeatedly and knowingly plagiarizing the work of its competitors. Here’s an excerpt from a statement [...]
A report from the Christian Science Monitor: The world’s most infamous agent of nuclear proliferation, Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, has added a fresh feather to his cap following revelations that a newspaper column he penned two weeks ago for Pakistan’s The News heavily plagiarized websites of British universities… The newspaper column in question, “Science [...]
This has been an incredibly bad summer for the Telegraph-Journal, a newspaper in New Brunswick. Early in the summer, the paper faced criticism for firing a summer intern under questionable circumstances. Then, in July, the editor and publisher had to step down after the paper started a national scandal by printing false allegations about the [...]
The cover article of The Times Magazine on Sunday reported on whales and the possibility of interspecies communication between them and humans. The final two paragraphs of the article described an occasion in 2005 when a humpback whale became entangled in crab-trap ropes and was freed by a rescue team. Some of the language in [...]
By John E. McIntyre When Waldo Jaquith of The Virginia Quarterly Review discovered and published that Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, had plagiarized passages from Wikipedia in his new book, Free, it provoked a lively, and sometimes alarming, discussion of plagiarism. Regret the Error has summarized the affair, and there are extensive comments on [...]
The Press Gazette’s Axegrinder blog spotted this apology in Cotswold Life magazine: In our January and February 2009 issues of Cotswold Life we published a number of articles focused on upcoming events in the county which included original material taken, without permission, from the website www.soglos.com. We are very sorry that we failed to seek [...]
A college student interning at the Colorado Spring Gazette has been fired after the paper discovered she plagiarized from the New York Times in four recent articles. An editor’s note from the paper: On Tuesday I learned that The Gazette has published four news stories during the past month that contain passages that are substantially [...]
The new book from Wired editor and bestselling author Chris Anderson contains multiple passages lifted from Wikipedia. The examples of plagiarism were discovered by a reviewer for the Virginia Quarterly Review and Anderson admits that he failed to properly attribute the text. Here’s how he explained himself: As some of you may have seen, VQR [...]
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 [...]
In her weekend column, the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd included a sentence that later turned out to be taken almost verbatim from Talking Points Memo. (Compare here.) She failed to include any attribution, and this caused TPM and others to accuse her of plagiarism. Dowd emailed a response to the allegations to the Nytpicker [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
