Reported incidents of plagiarism in the media are increasing nationwide, but thankfully Fairfield University’s student newspaper The Mirror isn’t on the wrong side of the statistics.
A report published by www.regrettheerror.com said that reported acts of plagiarism in journalism rose from just 16 occurrences in 2005 to 28 in 2006, a 75 percent increase. Included among them were five acts of plagiarism by student run University newspapers.
Plagiarism is taken very seriously in the world of Journalism, which is evidenced by the fact that 10 of the 28 writers who were caught last year were fired or resigned and two were suspended.
“My general sense is that intentional plagiarism is theft and should be treated accordingly,” said Richard Hanley, an Assistant Professor of Interactive Communications and the Graduate Director of Journalism and Interactive Communications.
While these instances of plagiarism were found all throughout the world, the Northeast was also a supporter. Among the newspapers cited in the report were the Harvard Crimson, New York Post, Philadelphia Daily News and Washington Post.
In addition to plagiarism in writing, five different media sources reported that photographers had altered images to make them more newsworthy. Among those mentioned in the report were the New York Times Magazine and Reuters.
There are all types of plagiarism, and reporters, as well as students, have to be careful not to fall into the trap. In fact, journalism professor and faculty advisor to the mirror Cindy Simoneau thinks the journalists are less likely to plagiarize than other writers.
“Because we go to direct sources so much, I think journalists don’t fall into that trap as much,” she said.
Simoneau went on to talk about how the internet and all of the technological blessings that come with it actually make it easier both for students to plagiarize and for teachers to catch them. Part of the problem, she feels, is that students aren’t even aware of what plagiarism entails.
“Not enough students are aware that they can’t use the intellectual ideas of others and pass them off as their own. It isn’t just research,” said Simoneau.
While the study admits that it is unclear whether the number of publicized instances of plagiarism rose because more journalists were plagiarized or because people were reading their stories more closely, it is clear that plagiarism is a problem in an industry relied on to bring its readers the truth.
The report shows that journalistic plagiarism is still strong, even in the aftermath of the Jayson Blair scandal, which spotlighted the issue in the spring of 2003 when the New York Times discovered that he had fabricated and plagiarized many articles during the course of his career.
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