Temple and the P-Word
Several folks have commented on John Temple's apparent reluctance to use the word "plagiarism" when discussing the Rocky Mountain News editorial that lifted passages from a blog and the Washington Post. Westword's Michael Roberts asked the paper's editor and publisher about his creative phrasing and got what seems like a perfectly understandable response.
But why did Temple describe the offense as "inappropriately duplicated wording" instead of plagiarism? Temple discloses that a "bad experience" in a previous arbitration case he declines to specify partly inspired his avoidance of the P-word. (Most likely, he's referring to a '90s faceoff with ex-music writer Justin Mitchell.) Even so, he doubts that any reader would be confused about whether Beal had done wrong.
Comments
Submitted by Marianne Goodland (not verified) on Fri, 2005-08-12 11:59.
There's another good example of Rocky plagarism - writer Rebecca Jones plagarized an article written in the Silver & Gold Record about the consolidation of the CU-Denver and Health Sciences Center campus in 2002. I was the writer of the S&GR piece, using, in some cases, original research and unnamed sources, which lo and behold showed up in the Rocky the very next day. After screaming bloody murder about it I got a less than honest apology from the Rocky, which admitted only to using the research, and of course, never admitting to plagarism.
And of course, the Rocky didn't run an Editor's note for this one either.
Submitted by Lisa J. (not verified) on Fri, 2005-08-12 11:47.
But did the Rocky use the "P" word with Mitchell?
From a 1995 article by Trudy Lieberman in Columbia Journalism Review:
...Editors' Notes, for instance, often avoid the "P" word. Time called the Michael Kramer incident a "regrettable lapse." The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in revealing that one of its writers, Renee Stovsky, had used four paragraphs from the San Jose Mercury News, noted that the paper "does not condone the improper appropriation of the work of others." ... The Rocky Mountain News didn't run an Editor's Note when it fired rock music critic Justin Mitchell (for what editor Jay Ambrose says were a "number of instances" of borrowing sentences and paragraphs) because editors were aiting the outcome of a Newspaper Guild arbitration, which ultimately went against the News....
http://archives.cjr.org/year/95/4/plagiarize.asp
