Hmm…. I found other article about this theme… But I did’n remember URL, sorry… Try to search google….
CARTER NELSEN: I flipped through three or four pages of Jayson Blair’s book at Barnes & Noble earlier today. Having interned with him at The Boston Globe in 1997, I just wanted to see if he named any of his fellow interns. But I only glanced — I swear to God — and I certainly didn’t buy the thing.
Anyway, it took me less than 20 seconds to run across the opening paragraph of Chapter 6, which touches on that summer internship:
“It was the summer of 1997. I was in the glass-walled office of Louisa Williams, the assistant managing editor in charge of recruitment, hiring and interns at The Boston Globe. I was about halfway into the twelve-week internship. Editors had been praising me for being enterprising, intense and coming to work early and staying late, but I could tell that this conversation was not going to be pretty.”
Which immediately brought to mind the opening paragraphs of a feature story that ran in the Globe on May 22:
“It was the summer of 1997, and Jayson T. Blair was at the center of a newsroom controversy. Blair, then 21, was sitting in the glass-walled office of assistant managing editor Louisa Williams. The door was closed. Just six weeks into a 12-week summer internship, Blair had already cut a considerable swath through The Boston Globe. In some respects, he was exactly what editors look for in a reporter: nervy, enterprising, prolific, eager to arrive early and stay late.”
I don’t know if that qualifies as plagiarism, but it reads to me like it’s in the same ballpark.
Here’s the definition of plagiarize from The American Heritage Dictionary:
v. tr.
1. To use and pass off (the ideas or writings of another) as one’s own.
2. To appropriate for use as one’s own passages or ideas from (another).
v. intr.
To put forth as original to oneself the ideas or words of another.
To my mind, that is exactly what he has done. He stole other’s words while at the Times, got caught, was rewarded with a book deal, and proceeds in the same vein as before. Sad.
