CBS News fires producer over blog plagiarism
Cory Bergman April 10th, 2007
The network said one of its producers plagiarized a story from the Wall Street Journal in a videoblog post hosted by Katie Couric. Reads the editor’s note on the Couric & Company blog, “The April 4 Notebook was based on a ‘Moving On’ column by Jeffrey Zaslow that ran in The Wall Street Journal on March 15 with the headline, ‘Of the Places You’ll Go, Is the Library Still One of Them?’ Much of the material in the Notebook came from Mr. Zaslow, and we should have acknowledged that at the top of our piece. We offer our sincere apologies for the omission.” CBS News said the producer who wrote the videoblog for Couric has been fired. “We were horrified,” CBS News spokeswoman Sandra Genelius said. “It was almost verbatim.”
5 Comments Add your own
1. Michael Rosenblum | April 11th, 2007 at 3:54 am
I am sure the fired producer was dumbstruck. TV news has ALWAYS stolen from newspapers. that’s where they get their stories from. What happened? All of a sudden everyone is getting very ‘moral’?
2. weaver | April 11th, 2007 at 5:10 am
The old textbooks for broadcast writing once had “how to rewrite” newspaper copy. It’s part of the broadcast news culture.
3. Jason | April 11th, 2007 at 6:42 am
Perhaps most embarrassing is that Katie delivers commentaries from “her notebook” that she doesn’t write.
4. Steve Safran | April 11th, 2007 at 8:10 am
That was funny, Rosey.
5. Corey Spring | April 11th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
The article about this that Newsweek did has some side by side comparisons, it really was just about verbatim.
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