Plagiarism

When Reuters first sent me to Moscow as a young innocent in 1965, the idea that someone else (or someone else’s editors) could put their byline on a story of mine and print it as their own simply never occurred to me. In those days, we almost never saw the “capitalist” media and the Daily Worker, the only newspaper from the UK sold in Moscow, played the game straight and always credited Reuters if it used our stories. (Of course, the Worker did have reasons other than pure journalistic decency - running a Reuter piece on something not exactly reflecting to the glory of the Soviet state enabled it to be at least covered on events in Moscow that were playing widely in the rest of the British press without getting its own correspondent into trouble with the Soviet authorities, who paid his - it was always his - salary.)

Those salad days of fondly imagining that my name must be bandied around the British breakfast tables (my own parents were not readers of the “posh” newspapers so there was no enlightenment coming from them) came to an end only 18 months later when I had my first home leave. The day before I had written what I fondly believed was the best story of my short life in the profession - a tear-jerking piece about the comeback of a famous Soviet footballer, Edward Streltsov, who four years earlier found that his regular escapades with vodka, women and songs whose lyrics were unworthy of a leading member of the Young Communist League had become so notorious (although not a word of them appeared in the Soviet media) that the Party decided to make an example of him and tuck him away for a while in the Gulag. My story, like the accounts of his earlier bad-boy behaviour, was based on information provided by our invaluable bureau “translator” Robert Exuzyan (who died earlier this year - see The Baron report) from his impeccable sources in the sporting world, and also on the announced fact that Streltsov, presumably now a reformed character, had been allowed back into the game and had been selected again for the Soviet national side.

Arriving at Heathrow - in those days there were only two BEA flights a week to and from Moscow - I spotted another traveller reading an Evening Standard open wide, and there spread across the back page was a big black headline reading something like: “Bad-Boy Soviet Soccer Star Forgiven by Kremlin.” With beating heart I bought five copies of the Standard at the W.H.Smith’s as evidence for relatives and friends that I had made it in the profession. A quick glance at the text of the story proved that it was indeed my piece, in all it’s finely-crafted 500-odd word excellence. Then I looked at the top of the page under the headline. “By Our Sports Writer” it read, adding a byline that was definitely not mine. I ditched those papers in a bin and saved the back page from one as a permanent reminder of professional perfidy. It got lost some years later, by which time anyway I had lost any illusion that Reuter copy was not treated by most newspapers as the raw material for piratic licence. ■