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Randy Cassingham's BlogHistorical Details and Author's Notes from This is True®
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Professional Thieves
The 11 December issue was reruns from 1995 since I was down with the flu. One of those stories was this one (which dealt with trying to embarrass journalists into better writing so there aren't so many errors in the paper). It was only the second "rerun column" ever in 11-1/2 years of weekly True issues.
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Well guess what? That made it really easy to discover that there are newspapers out there that don't buy True as a feature column (yes, I do sell it to newspapers as a column!), but use items from it anyway! Including the Toronto Star, who even used my tagline as if it was their words. I probably would have caught them, but someone else did first: Regret the Error, a newspaper blog that's entertaining enough that I'm making it the Bonzer site this week.
RtE's editor wrote me on New Year's Day to ask if I was aware of the plagiarism, and would I comment on it? I was not, and did. Their resulting report is here. Then, today, the newspaper industry bible, Editor & Publisher, ran with the story too (foolishly, no longer online. why do so many publications just throw away great content?!)
It's not the only recent newspaper blunder of taking stuff from the Internet: the Los Angeles Times recently ran a front page(!) story that a reporter sourced from the Internet; it turned out to be a hoax.
It's astounding to me that in this era of instant communications that newspapers ever attempt plagiarism or lazy sourcing practices, and then think they can get away with it. That newspapers don't understand that the Public Trust is involved here, and their continued violation of that trust is the reason that fewer and fewer people are reading newspapers anymore. This stuff matters! Newspapers are supposed to be the defenders of high professional standards, not the leader in savaging them.
I am extremely careful to state where I get the facts I use to write my stories, even though that's not required by copyright law. I'm very careful to use only the facts, not the "flavor" of how they're put together, only partly because that is required by copyright law. This isn't rocket science (and, as a guy who worked for 10 years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I know rocket science when I see it). If a guy working out of a spare bedroom at home understands this, why don't supposedly professional newspaper editors and publishers get it? As I told Regret the Error, as a journalism school graduate and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, "it's not fun to watch newspapers take yet another step into the depths right before my eyes."
Within days, the Star removed the story from their web site and issued a half-hearted correction. RtG followed up, and editorialized, "Rather than explain how the writer came to select the item and then fail to verify it, the Star merely mentions that it was a decade old and 're-posted' on Cassingham's site. It does not apologize to Cassingham. It does not explain that what was done is against Star policy and why. It does not detail any disciplinary action, or why none was taken. Let's be clear: We're not exactly calling for heads to roll, but the Star has to meet a higher standard of disclosure. Perhaps these issues will be addressed in a column from the Public Editor. But, for now, this inadequate correction is almost worse than no correction at all."
Sadly, the newspapers involved counted on something: that if they just deleted and hid, it would blow over. And indeed it did. Next time, I'm turning the case over to my attorney for action.
Update: The case made Regret the Error's 2006 Crunks List (worst gaffes of the year), in the "Best Abuse of Archives" section.
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