Regret the Error

The Vancouver Province has canceled a column by Dave Pratt, a Vancouver radio personality, after it was revealed he plagiarized from a Sports Illustrated article. The paper announced his firing in an article published yesterday.

…A reader alerted The Province to the plagiarism via e-mail after Pratt’s weekly column, called “Pratt’s Rant,” appeared in Tuesday’s editions of the newspaper.
The column, celebrating the winding down of the long career of Hockey Night In Canada play by play man Bob Cole, contained some clear similarities to the Reilly piece about legendary U.S. college basketball coach and broadcaster Al McGuire published in the Sept. 18, 2000, edition of Sports Illustrated.
The most striking was a passage in Reilly’s piece: “They say he was born 72 years ago last Thursday, but don’t believe it. McGuire dropped straight out of Guys and Dolls with a martini in one hand and a basketball in the other.”
Pratt wrote in Tuesday’s column in The Province: “Cole was born 75 years ago, but it’s more likely he dropped straight out of Guys and Dolls with a martini in one hand and a puck in the other.”
…In an interview, Pratt admitted he had taken material from the Reilly column.
“I did it, no question,” said Pratt. “It was a mistake. In our [radio] business, lines get used back and forth all the time. That particular line is a pretty famous line and I should have credited Reilly with it and I didn’t. It was a stupid mistake and something I regret and I’ll make damn sure I’ll never do it again.
“I’m looking for stuff from everywhere,” added Pratt. “We recycle everything. The sheer amount of volume we produce forces you to constantly be looking for different people’s ideas.”

Yes, I have to say it: the paper should review his previous columns to establish whether this is an isolated incident.

Thanks, Andrew!

UPDATE: When reached by phone, Pratt told the CBC that he plagiarized because “It was a Saturday and I wanted to get out of [the office] before noon.” One would assume that line will prevent him from ever working in print again. For now, it appears his radio job is safe. A spokesperson emailed the CBC to say, “We at the station are fully supporting David.”

It should also be noted that the Province story about the firing does not offer a full accounting of Pratt’s plagiarism. Andrew Bucholtz at Sporting Madness compared Pratt’s column to Reilly’s earlier story and it’s clear that Pratt stole much more than one “pretty famous line.”

“By my count, there are three paragraphs that are almost taken word-for-word from Reilly’s piece, with only the name changed from McGuire to Cole and the order of the paragraphs swapped,” Bucholtz wrote in an email to me. “The whole piece is pretty much exactly a carbon copy of Reilly’s article, just shuffled around a bit and with the names and dates altered.”