Hands up if you think it's OK to copy someone else's work or to take credit for someone else's words? Those of you who have been to university or practiced journalism would be aware that appropriating another person's work and passing it off as your own is verboten. In fact, plagiarism is a serious academic and professional sin which has swallowed the careers of prominent journalists and Vice Chancellors alike.
That's why a story about apparent plagiarism in a popular international journalism textbook, broken in South Africa today (read original story here), is so shocking. Professor Guy Berger, the head of Rhodes University's Journalism School, has revealed tracts of the latest edition of Global Journalism (2004) have been lifted from an earlier version without alteration and attributed to other authors without acknowledgment. The cut-and-paste job has also rendered the content utterly out of date.
And rather than acknowledging the errors of their ways and issuing a public mea culpa, the book's editors (Arrie De Beer and John Merrill)and the publisher (Pearson Education) have employed the classic tools of media manipulation: stonewall,deny, deflect and threaten.
There are important lessons here for journalists, journalism academics and journalism students alike and some very worrying mixed signals about professional practice.
If a student committed such an act of plagiarism they may be expelled; if a journalist was so exposed they may find themselves unemployed. Double standards defence anyone?
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