Everett Herald says sports columnist lifted passages from SI

I can't believe this thread is still rolling along. And all because henryhenry has turned this offender into the victim. Now it's my fault for having ethics. That's rich.

 

If you get caught plagiarizing someone or do anything else to merit your dismissal, the best thing you can do is immediately go to rehab.

The paper cannot and will not fire you because they'll be worried about a lawsuit. I watched this happen firsthand (not for plagiarism) and the guy actually hung around for a year before he found another job on his own terms and left.

 

I remember a very prominent Midwest sports columnist writing an obit column the day after Ben Hogan died, and it was about 80% extremely lightly-edited copy taken straight from a Hogan biography that I had edited. This writer had been one of my favorites growing up and I was shocked and heartbroken when I saw this. I was embarrassed for him. I told the author and publisher, although no action was taken because we felt he had changed enough words here and there to skirt the "fair use" issue, but he had done as little as possible. Shameful.

 

Every time something like this happens, the industry loses credibility and that's something the industry can't afford to lose right now.

The whole industry took a colossal hit after the Jayson Blair scandal. I would argue that it hasn't recovered.

I think there are a lot of people out there who think, "If I can pick up the New York Times and read something that is a complete fabrication, how on earth can I trust the local rag?"

It's not to say we were completely loved and trusted before, but it has gotten colossally worse over the last five or six years.

 

Ethics aside, one thing I've never understood about plagiarism is that someone who does it is basically admitting to himself that he can't write. I mean, if you're really so unable to come up with your own words that you would take someone else's, why are you doing this for a living? Anyone with any respect for his own ability would never try to pass someone else's work off as his own.

 

no one's flipping any switches. he already did that himself. and he's the one who should have a hard time sleeping at night, explaining to his family why he isn't (shouldn't, anyway) going to be going to work tomorrow.
sorry.

 

And, yet, people do it out here in Adultland every single day.

Not all of them take glee in it. I'm sure some Ari Gold-like people enjoy the hell out of it.

But grownups do what has to be done.

Grownups make choices. Sometimes those choices have very negative repercussions.

I would hate to fire someone, too. But if I'm in a position of authority, I wouldn't be doing my job and I wouldn't be doing my workplace any favors if I said to myself "OOOh, I can't handle the karma of actually firing someone, so I'll just put a strongly-worded rebuke in their personnel file."

Sorry, Pollyanna. This is how it works in the real world. You know the rules. You break them, you deal with the consequences. If I'm the one who administers the sentence, well, that's part of the gig. But you broke the rules, not me.

 

Yes, yes he did.

If journalism has a Rule 21, it's this: Don't plagiarize, or you're gone.

We know it. We all know it. If we choose to do it, for whatever reason, well, I'm sorry about your luck and your circumstances. You don't have to be homeless, but you can't work here anymore.

Hard? You bet.

Draconian? Yeah. For a reason.

You simply can't be in a position of authority and be a candyass. You just can't.

 

Not to beat a dead horse (much), but the guy DID make up facts.

Again, it wasn't plagiarizing -- or it wasn't just plagiarizing.

He would have us believe that he and the player had a "what's a screen" conversation on the last play of the only game they won, just like in Reilly's column.

How is that NOT making up "facts"?

 

The original column did strike me as a little fishy: I coached girls basketball, about that age group (and younger), for 6-8 seasons a decade or so ago, and a) they did not spend all that much time in the bathroom (I had female assistants, either my sister or GF, on hand in case they did), b) they knew what basket we were shooting for, and c) they all knew what a pick was; I didn't have to explain the difference between zone defense and man-to-man.

Maybe the players I coached were way more basketball-savvy than Reilly's, maybe I was a brilliantly-more-effective coach than he was; I dunno.

 

Wasn't arguing about trust as any sort of high-and-mighty esoteric rhetoric, although I was afraid you'd read it as such. My fault for not finding a better way to convey my thoughts.

Let me try to put it more clearly by asking a simple question: Could you work with someone -- would you want to work with someone -- whom you didn't trust, or found you couldn't trust?

On a very basic level, it would be extremely difficult, and could be reason enough for firing, regardless of whether an important journalistic tenet were involved, or not.

I'd argue right along with you for a more compassionate, self-reflective type of punishment if the issue were more behavioral or developmental in nature than this one.

But not this time.

 

I'll split some hairs here and say that what Jayson Blair did was considerably worse than what this guy did. Only because ripping off another writer, bad as it is, isn't nearly as bad as making up facts and events and phony people to quote and, in essence, whole stories.

Just had to get that off my chest.