Forget Jayson Blair, Jack Kelley and Stephen Glass. What happens when you can’t even trust the words of a food critic? Bart Ripp, restaurant critic of the Tacoma News Tribune, has quit ”after 32 years in the newspaper business, 15 of them here as a features writer, historian, postcard savant and restaurant critic.” Now, according to … Read more
How do you correct the Internet? All these reports of plagiarism and fakery in U.S. journalism — at least 10, according to the New York Times — raise a question I haven’t seen addressed elsewhere. What should newspapers and other publications which have carried the reports do about setting the record straight? A USA Today … Read more
With all this gadgetry, you’d think that plagiarism was a thing of the past. OK, it wasn’t plagiarism, more like fiction, but the point is the same: Watching Shattered Glass, the movie about fabulating New Republic ‘journalist’ Stephen Glass, the other night, I couldn’t help wondering why no one had picked up on his lies … Read more
Just in case we journalists get too depressed about recent cases of invention and plagiarism, consider scientists. Nature’s website quotes the annual report of the Committee on Publishing Ethics, which it says details misdemeanours that “cover a wide range of unethical activity, from attempted bribery to potential medical malpractice.” Two complaints concern cases where researchers … Read more