Thursday, Apr. 30, 2009

A capital crime in newspapers, a capital idea in broadcast

By Ken Robertson, Herald Executive Editor

In the newspaper world, plagiarism has always been a capital crime. It usually will get the plagiarist fired or, for a lesser offense, suspended without pay and reprimanded.

In my 40 years of newspapering, I’ve encountered it twice at the newspapers where I’ve worked. In one case, a senior staff member was fired. In the other, in which a paragraph of boilerplate material was copied, the offender was censured and warned another offense would result in dismissal.

And when it occurs at big newspapers, as it does occasionally, it’s often national news and results in a high-profile dismissal.

For at least two decades, the Herald newsroom’s style, ethics and policy manual has warned: “Plagiarism is grounds for disciplinary action, up to and including dismissal.”

Alas, in the world of broadcast news, plagiarism remains as common as sand in the Sahara. So common, Herald readers regularly tell me that they heard a television or radio “news” person read one of the Herald’s stories on the air.

So common that Herald staffers almost every week report incidents of plagiarism they’ve heard on local news broadcasts.

Recently while I was at Washington State University in Pullman for the Edward R. Murrow Symposium, a veteran ad sales guy who worked in the Tri-Cities a couple decades ago asked me if his old station was still cutting out newspaper stories and reading them on the air.

I told him they weren’t quite so obvious about it anymore, but that it still was common. He was not surprised.

With the advent of the internet, the same practice has migrated to radio and television websites. And it’s become a very sore subject now that newspapers are competing directly with those websites.

Tri-City broadcasters routinely “report” a skeleton of a story they’ve just hurriedly read on tricityherald.com. How do we know? Well, they didn’t have a reporter at the court hearing, the accident scene or the county commission meeting.

And they read the same quotes Herald reporters obtained from a news source in a private interview.

The Associated Press has tried to convince broadcasters to credit the news reports they receive via the AP, but with mixed success. One of the Tri-City television stations, KEPR, routinely credits the Herald because we’ve been building a news partnership. The others seem to have little interest in reforming.

And the AP pressure doesn’t carry over to the smaller local stories that broadcasters steal from newspapers and newspaper websites because smaller items usually aren’t picked up by the AP. So, at best, many talking heads would only be halfway honest if they followed AP guidelines.

Of course, they could credit the newspaper and we’d have no complaint. But they seem to prefer to deceive their listeners, their viewers and even themselves.

Ken Robertson: 582-1520; krobertson@tricityherald.com

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