Plagiarism

Many of us must have stories on this theme, and it’s worth recalling that until Reuters, AP, etc, started to make an issue of this around 20 years ago, newspapers did not really think they were doing anything wrong. The wire services were considered the street-walkers of the news business: the client paid his money and then was pretty much entitled to do what he liked! In July 1988, when I was diplomatic correspondent, I wrote an analysis saying that 1988 was shaping up as “the year that peace broke out”. When my counterpart at The (London) Independent the next day wrote a story with the same lead and employing much of the same material, I wrote him a letter (remember letters?) but got no reply. On another occasion my then news editor, Alex Frere, complained to The Guardian after they plundered a story I had written about, I think, Hungary, and ran it under their own man’s byline, but of course there was no public acknowledgement from the paper. In 1996 I was one of a group of State Department correspondents taken to the scene of the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia within 24 hours of it happening. Also in the group was a reporter for USA Today. The next day the newspaper ran his byline and three paragraphs of his story followed seamlessly by my story in full. When he called his foreign desk to ask why they had done that he was told (as he recounted to me later) that the Reuters story was “written from the heart”. A compliment, I suppose, but it managed to annoy me and humiliate their own man. ■