The conclusion I draw from these two examples is that the Washington Post is a much more ethical company than the Long Island Press. I really, honestly believe that if a Post reporter was caught lifting paragraphs from a blog the repercussions would have been the same. Likewise if an LIP reporter lifted paragraphs from another print publication.

I suspect they are more ethical because there are more consequences.

You're right, but you're also not distinguishing finely enough. Pulling text directly from somebody else's story (even with minor modifications) is a deadly no-no if you get caught. But that isn't what happened here. She didn't copy one paragraph from his story — she just took his facts and wrote her own story around them. Basically, she treated the blog post as a lead rather than a source. It's generally seen as a lesser crime, if they think of it as a crime at all — I know some newspapers actually encourage it — and it's far more common.

Plagarism isn't just taking things word for word, if you take anyone's ideas without permission, YOU ARE STEALING. Furthermore, this author didn't even bother cross checking the blog post with any source. If something is common knowledge then you would have a case, at it is obviously not the case here, this is pure and simple plagarism. Re-using the exact same image is just insult to injury.

The main issue here is they had the opportunity to cite the source before and afterword with a simple and free link. Instead they thought they would be Gob and just rewrite history, too bad for them they are not exactly bright with journalism or technology. Negative publicity is a given, but they deserve worse for all covering up this dipsh*t did after the fact.

>if you take anyone's ideas without permission, YOU ARE STEALING.

Plagiarism isn't [generally] a crime. There is no general legal protection for artistic ideas (patents usually have a clause requiring industrial application; copyright protects works and not ideas per se). In addition - and this makes me think you're trolling - using another persons idea isn't stealing unless you do something like electroshock therapy to remove that idea from their memory. Stealing requires that something is taken and then can't be used any longer by whomever it was taken from; you can't steal an idea.

>Re-using the exact same image is just insult to injury.

The original and subsequent use appear to be [copyright] infringing use of an image which from what I can tell is the original work of the owners of petitelapgiraffe.com. Certainly if iandennismiller.com has any default right to use it then too does longislandpress.com.

I can't access the original cache but from the rest of what is presented this just looks like Mr Miller wrote a blog post that a journo read, journo wrote a story on the same thing referencing the same source; TBH I can't see the fault in that. Whilst it would have been nice to credit the reference that gave one the source I don't really see it as unethical not to.

You make assumptions instead of reading what is written.

He said it is plagiarism, then affirms again that t is stealing. This is the generally accepted definition of plagarism. He doesn't accuse anyone of a crime, if he had maybe he would have used words like fraud or copyright infringement, or something along those lines, instead he said plagiarize; and as other have commented, plagiarism doesn't necessarily constitute copyright infringement and vice versa.

And then you proceeded to take the insult to injury comment out of context, in context he meant that obviously this author who plagiarized didn't even care enough to find out if someone owned the image either, or further that it had apparently been edited by the blogger in question. No claims were made about copyright infringement whatsoever, but it showed a significant lack of due diligence even further so then simply plagiarizing the article.

So now that I am done refering to myself in 3rd person. I would absolutely love to take a lesson out of your book and assume you are something based on what you write (or don't write) out of context and make myself feel 5 times better, but your not worth it.

And yes you can steal an idea, people get thrown out of higher education everyday for stealing someone's idea.

And if negative karma is the consequence of well worded opinion, then I haven't a clue why anyone would want positive karma.

> And yes you can steal an idea, people get thrown out of higher education everyday for stealing someone's idea.

No, they get thrown out for doing something against the rules of the school. The fact that they get thrown out does not prove that an idea was meaningfully stolen (as opposed to the simpler explanation, in which the student experienced a lapse of integrity in following citation requirements).

A thought experiment: If I believe that we have a duty to repay society for all that it has done for us, then in order not to be a thief, am I required to raise Immanuel Kant from the dead and ask him for permission every time I want to bring it up in conversation? Obviously, no. I'm allowed to believe the same thing as Immanuel Kant and it is not theft. If I got my ideas from Kant but tried to deny it, that would be dishonest, and he would still be the originator, but ideas aren't really property.

This isn't defending what the Long Island Press did, but you're going too far in the other direction.

Actually, it looks like the journalist neglected to cite any source initially, and when he called her on it, she went and did the WHOIS search he described so she could claim to have done that research herself — and then deleted the bit about the image being stock art, since apparently she didn't know how to re-discover that information and was unwilling to use him as a source.

I've caught lots of journalists plagiarizing, including Chris Hedges, and none of them have ever gotten fired. I even caught our state senator Toni Boucher plagiarizing an article she 'wrote', and it's not like she was forced to step down.

I'm sure folks do get fired for plagiarism, but it seems to be the exception rather than the rule, where mostly no one cares until the complaints start getting loud enough.