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 We’ve dusted off an early and previously unpublished ePluribus Media story, written before we even had a public website, that focused on the practice of Jeff Gannon and Talon News staff of “lifting” other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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