That's Some Fuckery

Guys, listen up. I’m tired of reading about writers getting fired for plagiarism. First, my homeboy Gerald Posner got canned “resigned” for confusing his own notes with those from articles that were already written, which apparently only happened because he was asked to produce articles on a timely basis. He said, “In the compressed deadlines of the Beast, it now seems certain that those master files were a recipe for disaster for me. It allowed already published sources to get through to a number of my final [works] and in the quick turnaround I then obviously lost sight of the fact that it belonged to a published source instead of being something I wrote.” FUCK-ERY.

And today, we read about Zachery Kouwe, an NY Times reporter who also seems shocked he was caught “lifting copy” from the Wall Street Journal. But instead of blaming his deadlines, he attributed his fuckery to being required to write 7,000 words every week for the blog and other articles. Basically, he feels the English language doesn’t have enough words for him to create unique sentences, so he has no choice but to take other people’s. He says, “I write essentially 7,000 words every week for the blog and for the paper and all that stuff. As soon as I saw, I guess, like six examples [of plagiarism], I said to myself, ‘Man what an idiot. What I was thinking?’

I ain’t gots no idea. The moral of this story, kids, is if you’re in the journalism industry, learn multiple languages and keep two sets of notes: yours and those of the people you plan to steal from.