ePluribus Media has a three-part feature on Talon News: Propaganda & Plagiarism posted on the ePluribus Media journal. In the series, are points made similar to those quoted below:
As real reporters risked their lives to gather news, something very different happened within Talon News Service, an invention of GOPUSA, a partisan group with close ties to George W. Bush’s Texas backers.
Jim Hauser was busy stealing the words coming in from Iraq. Talon’s writer sat thousands of miles from the battlefield, had taken no personal risk and had generated none of the material for his story, but Talon released his report under a Baghdad dateline.
Talon published the fabrication on April 8, 2003. Only five days earlier, a real American journalist — Michael Kelly, a magazine editor and Washington Post columnist — had lost his life in Iraq. He left a wife and two children.
Editors’ note: The debacle that occurred this past week with the hiring and subsequent resignation of Ben Domenech at blogspot.washingtonpost.com brings the issue of plagiarism to the fore once more. We’ve dusted off an early and previously unpublished ePluribus Media story, written before we even had a public website, that focused on the practice of Jeff Gannon and Talon News staff of “lifting” other writers’ work.
It is a refresher on what plagiarism is and a call to those plagiarized to stand up for their unique rights to the product of their creativity.
An additional commentary, posted by Luaptifer on the ePluribus Media Community site, Citizen Journalism Priority: Avoiding Plagiarism in Research and Writing provides clear guidelines of how to avoid plagiarism.
Propaganda and Plagiarism — Discussion at ePluribus Media community.
Many ePluribus Media writers, researchers, editors and production folk contributed to this effort: Kiw, NyBri, Ron Brynaert, Charlie Wilson, SawcieLacky, wanderindiana, kfred, luaptifer, Sue in KY, SusanG, Standingup, Stoy, JeninRI, Maddy Houseman Sojourner, Sean Mykael, and Ryan Fenno
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I think it’s so important to bring this kind of propaganda campaign to light. Thanks for the great work.
the act of plagiarism by the intellectual turnip heads who do it, is the seemingly total absence of journalistic standards, practices, and ethics by the news organs that hire the plagiarists.
Is it any wonder that newspapers are in decline? Is it any wonder that infotainment has replaced news? When the public can’t trust the news source, and the news source does nothing to enforce professional guidelines in producing news stories, what’s the public to do? Turn to entertainment over information, of course. There’s no motive to watch an actual news program or read a self-styled “news”paper any longer.
Without the assurance that legitmate news is being reported accurately, I can’t see any reason at all to support so-called legitimate news sources.
Deliberate plagiarism is bad. But in the case of Talon (and who knows how many other yet undiscovered “news” outlets), it’s part of the propaganda problem. Cherry picking tidbits to flesh out government paid for copy (either press releases or “education” pieces) needs to be exposed as the propaganda it, in many cases, is.
This is such an important issue especially as it pertains to the kind of what I think of as “public relations journalism!”
During the earlier Gannon (sp) brouhaha he was demonized for being a gay “hooker” too, so that kinda obscured the real issues which you point out above, but it seems to be the pattern for Republicans.
While not as sexy as the male escort story, the bigger picture of how they are willing to put message above principles is more important.