The following is an excerpt of a report from JustThe News.
A bombshell report at Buzzfeed on Friday revealed that a major fact-checking website was publishing plagiarized articles during a high-profile partnership with Facebook several years ago.
Snopes.com, a storied urban legend-debunking website, published “dozens of articles containing material plagiarized from news outlets such as the Guardian and the LA Times,” Buzzfeed News reports.
The articles, written by site co-founder David Mikkelson, were run between 2015 – 2019, some years of which Snopes was partnered with Facebook to assist the social media site in fact-checking news and Internet articles.
Mikkelson admitted in a statement to Buzzfeed that he had “engaged in multiple serious copyright violations of content that Snopes didn’t have rights to use,” adding: “There is no excuse for my serious lapses in judgement. I am sorry.”
In an interview with Buzzfeed, Mikkelson claimed ignorance of the tenets of journalism, telling the news service: “I didn’t come from a journalism background. I wasn’t used to doing news aggregation.” (Continued…)
And now that we know this, what’s next? A heartfelt apology isn’t enough
It is all for a good cause and they both have the same agenda so I really do not see a problem. Mikkelson’s claim of ignorance seems to be sincere, After all how was he to know that the plagiarism rules he learned in 3d grade still applied in the real world. Also in Mikkelson’s defense, both the print and broadcast media all seem to be using the same basic story-line, I guess he thought it was okay bro him to jump on the proverbial bandwagon.
Error Above. In the last sentence, it should read “okay for him to jump on”.
Plagiarizing:
The easiest way to determine plagiarizing/copying/cheating is when several students use the same wrong answer for an assignment. While there can be legitimate reasons, odds do not favor it being the case.
Apply that to the frequency of false reporting by the media professionals and draw your own conclusions.