Friday, March 24, 2006

The Editor Did It!

This is silly. The plagiarism examples keep rolling into my inbox:

Late yesterday, the liberal Web sites Daily Kos and Atrios posted examples of what appeared to be instances of plagiarism from Domenech's writing at the William & Mary student paper. Three sentences of a 1999 Domenech review of a Martin Scorsese film were identical to a review in Salon magazine, and several sentences in Domenech's piece on a James Bond movie closely resembled one in the Internet Movie Database. Domenech said he needed to research the examples but that he never used material without attribution and had complained about a college editor improperly adding language to some of his articles.


...and, let me add, as someone who has graded plenty of papers I know the difference between "inadvertent plagiarism" where a good faith but failed effort is made to restate something found elsewhere and wholesale lifting of paragraphs.



...and, as james notes, it would be truly bizarre for an editor to lift an entire column from PJ O'Rourke and put his name on it. (Yes, I know this defense doesn't even pass the giggle test but for some reason it's convincing the the country's most prominent media critic Howard Kurtz).