Plagiarism

A scandal is brewing in the blogging world. Allegations are flying that Sean-Paul Kelley of The Agonist has been lifting stories from company called Stratfor without any sort of credit. I initially saw story about this at Oliver Willis who linked to Ken Laye who linked to Instapundit, which got me to lengthy WIRED magazine article. Considering that the Internet makes it easy to uncover plagiarism, not sure why anyone would do it over and over and over again (once I could brush off, but doing it 5-6 times a week is unforgiveable). If you don’t have original information and don’t want to give credit where credit is due, don’t blog.
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April 8, 2003 at 9:56 am
Leigh Hanlon
In the Wired account, Columbia University Journalism professor Sreenath Sreenivasan declares, “If blogging wants to take itself seriously as journalism, then the rules of journalism apply: Don’t plagiarize.” True enough. But as they used to say at the old City News Bureau, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” To me, the real issue here is why The New York Times, Newsweek, NBC Nightly News, and NPR failed to research this guy adequately before annointing him a fair-haired wunderkind. If these news organizations are so sloppy on a story like this, shouldn’t we question how well-researched their other stories are, as well?