Sari Horwitz suspended for plagiarism

You can never, ever know all the facts. But in this case, we know the most important one.

 

I find it very interesting that some of the people who have been busted for plagiarism/fabrication are some of the best writers around.

Stephen Glass, Olesker, Barnicle, Maureen Dowd...

As I've said before on this board, I was at a paper where three people were nailed for nearly identical instances of plagiarism within a couple years of each other. One received no discipline after he threatened to quit if they suspended him. (He was and is a big-timer) another was suspended, but everybody was told he was on vacation or on leave for family reasons. He was and still is a big timer as well. The other guy probably has never had a byline since and this was about a decade ago.

 

Some papers' stars are so fawned over that they probably convince their editors that the people from whom they allegedly plagiarized actually stole the passages from them in advance. Just cuz some peon writes something doesn't mean that the great scribe who writes it later lifted it -- the peon shouldn't have squatted on our genius' words.

 

So we now know that two Pulitzer buys you a lot of currency. But has anyone at the Post reviewed the stories for which she won Pulitzers? Was everything involving those articles on the up-and-up? And in this case, she cut and pasted 10 GRAPHS!! Not like she took one quote out and used it.

 

The reaction to the Globe palagarers has always bothered me.
The big-time talking heads and corporate types who torpedoed Patricia Smith's career had no problem kissing Mike Barnacle's ass and giving him TV, radio and eventually print jobs again.
And the same hands who took care of Barnacle will just tell you you're playing the race card if you dare bring that up.

 

Not sure if it has been posted on this board before, but this CJR article from the mid 90s found that if they wanted to stay in journalism, pretty much everyone who plagiarized was allowed back into the clubhouse:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080212120754/backissues.cjrarchives.org/year/95/4/plagiarize.asp

 

I was plagiarized once that I know of. I lost track of how many times I had quotes stolen from me, but there was one instance where a beat writer who I worked with took five paragraphs word for word from a story I had written a year before. It was in a clip book at the NCAA Tournament and I confronted the writer, who I was friendly with, and I said, "Can you make me understand why you did this? There's nothing special about what you took." and it was explained to me that he lifted the paragraphs planning to put them in his own words and then just didn't.

There was no way he would ever be caught unless I called his SE, which I could not bring myself to do. I could not have someone losing his job on my conscience. He's still working and doing quite well for himself... Such is life...

 

I just want to say that is the most spectacular misspelling I have ever seen. Kudos.

 

It should have been palageri?

 

Your spelling is wicked awful!