The publisher and co-editor of Swans discusses the thing that is "a reflection of our societal rot."
From the piece...
Recently, Jack Shafer at Slate uncovered the trickery of Gerald Posner, a former chief investigative reporter for the Daily Beast, who consistently and serially plagiarized while remaining in denial and advancing the same age-old excuses that did not pass muster with Shafer -- the same excuses that were invoked by Zachery Kouwe, who used to peddle his wares on the NYT blog DealBook until it was discovered that his hands were embedded into the cookie jar, namely the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and The Financial Times. (Clark Hoyt, the current public editor at the NYT, had a few words of dismay to say about the encounter...written, of course, in NYT polite and PC words.)
The plagiarizers always advance the same lame excuses. It was "inadvertent" due to "sloppy work methods"; it was "banal stuff," just "banal sentences," "background snippets" inserted in a large computer file containing one's "own work." It was truly unintended "carelessness." Both Hoyt and Shafer provide a similar presentation of these excuses in their respective articles. Full disclosure: I too use a text file when I research an issue for an article like this one, but especially for my Blips. I copy and paste small snippets of factual information from many sources, but first, I always copy and paste the URL where I found the text, and second, I never, ever include my own writing in that file so that I am absolutely confident that whatever resource the file contains is not mine. If I use any of it, I include quotation marks or indent the text and insert a link to the source. No confusion is possible.
Worse cases of plagiarism in which a piece is lifted in its entirety and reused without any permission from or attribution to the author are becoming widespread, and nobody is immune.
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