Posted on 03/24/2006 10:47:49 AM PST by RWR8189
In the past 24 hours, we learned of allegations that Ben Domenech plagiarized material that appeared under his byline in various publications prior to washingtonpost.com contracting with him to write a blog that launched Tuesday.
An investigation into these allegations was ongoing, and in the interim, Domenech has resigned, effective immediately.
When we hired Domenech, we were not aware of any allegations that he had plagiarized any of his past writings. In any cases where allegations such as these are made, we will continue to investigate those charges thoroughly in order to maintain our journalistic integrity.
Plagiarism is perhaps the most serious offense that a writer can commit or be accused of. Washingtonpost.com will do everything in its power to verify that its news and opinion content is sourced completely and accurately at all times.
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.washingtonpost.com ...
Not so fast... it appears that RedState is going to the mattresses for this one.
Thank you.
Oh, and if the WaPo does establish such a Blog LINK page, may I be so bold as to recommend the DUmmie FUnnies?
You're welcome!
Apologies for my very poor reading skills today. I'm usually more careful. Yes, there are many things worse than simple plagiarism and what Duranty did is a classic example. The partisan crimes of Dan Rather and his dorky producer constitute another.
I am correct. Your example of ghost writing is in a completely different category of publishing law. Use of copyrighted works within any document requires citations and credit. Use of large chunks of copyrighted material also requires permission, which must be acknowledged in print.
I have been in publishing for thirty years. I am now a professional writer well versed in publishing law. In my former position as a senior staff editor at Reader's Digest - a magazine that uses formerly published works as its bread and butter - I was responsible for (among many other things) ensuring all quotes were credited, all credits noted and all permissions acquired and paid for.
This writer is guilty of plagiarism, no ifs, ands, or buts.
Yes, yes, and yes. Too many a student has recieved an F or Incomplete for not following your instructions.
THese aren't documents, they are newspaper articles, opinion columns, and blog entries. I don't know if there is a distinction there, but this isn't a book he wrote.
If I asked for and got your permission, I could take your answer to me, and post it to my blog as if it was my own work.
I have given people permission to lift paragraphs I have written and put them in their own writing, and usually specifically ask NOT with attribution. Surely you are not telling me that it is illegal for these people to honor my wishes? They are my words, if I want to let someone else use them without saying where they came from, I have every right to do so.
I realise that it is unlikely that these real writers told some guy he could reprint their stuff as their own without attribution. I'm just saying that if they did, he would not be plagerizing to do so.
Maybe i'm missing something here, or maybe I'm hung up on the distinction between breaking the law and simply showing a lack of manners.
Yes, you are. You are missing: knowledge, evidence, law, and fact.
Ok, let's take one example, the O'Rourke piece.
Ben says that he met O'Rourke, and talked about his piece. He asked O'Rourke if he could copy his piece and change a few lines to make it fit for a college audience, and O'Rourke told him to go right ahead, he thought it was a great ideal. The paper ran it as "inspired by the original".
So, in your professional opinion -- is that Plagerism? Does he have to mention O'Rourke IN THE PIECE, so long as the paper said where it came from somewhere?
In another case, he wrote something that was unattributed in a publication, and then he copied it under his own name in another publication. Can you really plagerize yourself?
As I said all along, I am willing to believe he committed plagerism, if I see evidence that he copied stuff from OTHER writers without permission, or if he hid this from his editors. But it is not plagerism simply because something with your name is the same as something written earlier without your name.
BTW, the things that looked most like plagerism he's saying were inserted by his editors, and when he figured out what was happening he quit. Impossible to prove that now, since everybody is gone and this was when he was 17.
If you hired a writer, and he never did anything wrong, but you later found out that when he was 17 he wrote something for a newspaper that wasn't properly attributed, that he wasn't paid for, and that the original author gave him permission to use, would you fire him?
And in the interest of disclosure, I am a writer. And I have never lifted somebody's words without attribution in my career as a writer. At least on purpose. I have no doubt that some of the clever turns of phrase I have used could have inadvertantly been something I've read in my long life.
Here is Ben's explanation for the NRO article. Assuming he is telling the truth, please give me your expert opinion -- is this plagerism?
I can rebut several of the alleged incidents here. The most recent accusation, is that I stole a music review from Crosswalk and passed it off at National Review Online. In fact, I wrote both lists myself; I was one of Crosswalk's music review contributors at the time.
Here is Ben's explanation for the O'Rourke piece. Assuming again that he is telling the truth, and that the paper had something some where that said the piece was "inspired by" O'Rourke, I again humbling ask for your expert opinion -- was this plagerism?
In one instance, I have been accused me of passing off P.J. O'Rourke's writing as my own in a column for the paper. But the truth is that I had met P.J. at a Republican event and asked his permission to do a college-specific version of his classic piece on partying. He granted permission, the piece was cleared with my editors at the paper, and it ran as inspired by O’Rourke’s original.
OK, now lets look at the movie reviews. Here is Ben's explanation for how the copied material made it into his byline. Again, if he is telling the truth, in your opinion, is the author of a piece the guilty party for not checking what the editor adds, or is the editor the guilty party? If the editor puts words into the piece, obviously the writer isn't plagerizing by having his name on the editor's words -- but if the editor's words are taken from somewhere else, is the author guilty of plagerism?
My critics have also accused me of plagiarism in multiple movie reviews for the college paper. I once caught an editor at the paper inserting a line from The New Yorker (which I read) into my copy and protested. When that editor was promoted, I resigned. Before that, insertions had been routinely made in my copy, which I did not question. I did not even at that time read the publications from which I am now alleged to have lifted material. When these insertions were made, I assumed, like most disgruntled writers would, that they were unnecessary but legitimate editorial additions
Ben does apologize for not being a more conscientious 17-year-old. But I find it hard to be upset with him about that.
Last example. In this case, Ben says that he attended a Frist press conference, and took his own notes, so when he put Frist quotes in his article, they should have looked just like everybody else's quote. If someone publishes a person's quotes before you, but you heard them directly, is it plagerism if you don't credit people who beat you to the publication?
The Left has also accused me of foisting Sen. Frist quotes and some descriptive material from the Washington Post for a New York Press article on the Capitol Shooter. But the quotes I used were either properly credited or came from Sen. Frist’s press conference, which I attended along with many other reporters. So it is no surprise that we had similar quotes or similar descriptions of the same event. I have reams of notes and interviews about the events of that day. I also went over the entire piece step by step with NYPress editors to ensure that it was unquestionably solid before it ran.
I will apologize for not knowing all the facts, and not presenting what I thought the facts were, when I was previously saying i wasn't ready to believe the charge of plagerism.
I eagerly await your opinion on these explanations.
And I said this because I wanted to be clear that I'm only arguing over whether he is guilty of an actual crime, not saying that I agree with the way he handled things back in college, or that I think it's the RIGHT way to do things.
I'm merely questioning whether conservatives should simply believe whatever liberal moonbats say, and should call for firing people from a job they had for a week because of accusations about something they did 8 years earlier when they were 17 and writing as a volunteer for some tiny college paper.
I certainly hope nobody wants to fire me from my job because of something I did in college.
It's over. NRO has the goods on him:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/06_03_19_corner-archive.asp#093326
And he's changed his tune as well:
http://www.redstate.com/story/2006/3/24/231559/931
Yes, it is sad. I can understand making mistakes when you are 17, but I can't understand why he thought he could get away with not being truthful NOW, with the eyes of hundreds of thousands of leftists watching his every move.
THe oddest things was that he claimed he copied his OWN review, but NRO says that it was written by Cox. Maybe they were talking about two different reviews.
I'm not surprised that some reviews had a few lines that looked similar. They had the kinds of changes you are taught to make in high school when you research out of other material. Attribution is so easy though, that there is no excuse not to let people know who you are flattering with your imitation.
I thought the blog was a bad idea from the beginning, without knowing this would happen.
I hate how often we only get to come away with the knowledge that at least when OUR guys are wrong, they own up pretty quickly, or don't fight to the bitter end, or that we don't all excuse their actions.
I apologize if anything I've said anywhere about this even appeared to be excusing his actions. I was at some point trying to argue the legality of the activity rather than the ethics of it, and I might have been wrong even about that.
I'm so used to the left lying about everything, that it's almost surreal when they are actually right about something.
Please still feel free to answer my other questions, as I am genuinely interested. But obviously events have overtaken the claims Ben made earlier. So it's just a theoretical exercise -- we can pretend Ben told the truth, but he apparently did not.
I apologize for my tone and stridency. I hate when the leftist moonbats get something right, especially when it made no difference to them one way or another.
No worries - conservatism has survived worse than this. It's a bit bigger than just Ben whatshisname ;)
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