The Editor Did It
Mar 24th, 2006 at 6:56 am by Susie
Weasel words from Young Ben:
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.
Yes, in every single publication for which he wrote, those evil (and probably liberal, and thus jealous) editors twisted his timeless prose by salting it with stolen paragraphs.
You see why I love wingnuts?
I was on a conference call last night and we got into a discussion about this guy. I said how pissed off liberal bloggers get that the media treats bloggers as a monolithic bloc when the wingnuts have no problem whatsoever with simply making shit up to support their opinions. I said (and believe) that liberal bloggers have ethical values much closer to that of journalists, and it was silly of journalists not to make the distinction.
“Well, I’m sure the right wing bloggers feel the same way,” the other person said. You know, fair and balanced.
I counted to ten - okay, five. And then I said, “It doesn’t matter what they feel. What matters is whether they source their opinions with any credibility.”
How long did this take to totally, completely, absolutely BLOW UP in the Post’s face? 72 hours?
Holy crap, if this reflects the due-dilligence they perform, how can we ever, ever trust anything they report, let alone their editorial contributions?
F*ers, they’ve totally disgraced themselves.
great answer susan,
but of course, you could simply have pointed to the “defence” of domenech by his cronies which explicitly states that plagiarism is simply not a problem for them if it is in
a) movie reviews
b) took place “a long time ago”
c) is not substantive.
So, no more fact checkers for you journalists, either, I suppose, because all those petty details like who what where probably don’t matter or can be plagiarized.
aimai