Sins of journalism

Yeah, I understand what your saying Buck. That's why laying off someone is hard to categorize because it many cases a despicable where like you say, the hiring editor isn't at fault. It wasn't premeditated like the others were but the results are just bad.

 

I had a tough time picking between fabricating and plagiarism. On the whole, my guess is the general public doesn't care about plagiarism where just flat out making something up they do.

I ended up going with plagiarism because in a sense you are fabricating a story and stealing on top of it.

 

Some other transgression:

Doing a bad impersonation of the Queen of the May on Sports Reporters, each and every week.

 

Torn between plagiarizing and fabricating. On one hand, it's really effed up to steal someone else's work, but it's even worse to quote people who never said something, and make up statistics. That's just awful.

 

One thing that makes fabricating a worse sin is that it's so easy to do and hard to catch.

So you don't want people who are tempted to quote made-up Mary Smith of Podunk whenever they are supposed to get reaction.

 

How hosed would someone be to plagiarize a fabricated story?

 

I voted fabrication. If I could have picked two, my second would be plagiarism.

I had a message board for an online RPG I was playing. I considered plagiarism the cardinal sin of the board. If you stole someone else's ideas, you were gone. Plain and simple.

 

"Is your source credible on that?"

I also chose fabrication. Some readers may not understand why plagiarizing something is bad when they see the same AP story in two papers. But they do know that making things up is bad.

 

Agree with you there. While plagiarizing is certainly bad, making things up about someone or something, I feel, is worse.