New York Times Says Reporter 'Borrowed' Repeatedly

I'll never understand how someone thinks they're going to get away with this.

 

It's not plagiarism, it's sampling. [/crossthreading]

 

I double checked that thread to make sure this wasn't be discussed there.

I think Zachery will have a much tougher time using that excuse.

 

Thousands of honest, hard-working journalists out on the streets and the Times keeps hiring these jokers.

Makes me sick.

 

They have a newsroom of 1,000-plus, the vast majority of which are top-notch, elite reporters.

I hardly think an isolated incident reflects on their hiring practices as a whole.

 

What do you expect?

Democrats tend to be naturally lazy.

 

I can't believe the guy thought he could get away with it at the same paper that brought everybody the Jayson Blair scandal.

 

You'd like to think they could catch this stuff themselves instead of having to be told about it.

Is their any kind of software that papers can purchase to check their stories for plagiarism? If not, there should be.

You'd think that google or someone could compare the text on your site to that of other papers.

 

Sounds good in principle, but think of the vast volumes of stuff you'd have to go through. Just newspapers alone, there are probably millions of words printed every day. And you'd have to have access to them, so you could only compare things that were online. Anything that appeared in print, you'd never be able to check.

And I don't think it would be as simple as using a piece of software to scan the site. I think it would only really work if newspapers uploaded their content to some central database, and I just don't see that happening.

Not to mention all the false positives you'd get from stories that used the same quotes.

 

Exactly. It's just not that precise of a science. Jack Shaffer has been hammering some reporter from Politico or somewhere like that for about two weeks now, and most of the "proof" he keeps tossing up looks more like previously reported facts (fair game) than plagiarism (not fair game) to me.

 

Match, meet lighter fluid. This should be fun.

 

1,000-plus "topnotch, elite (?)" journalists, and yet not one ounce of truly objective news reporting. What are the odds of that?