plagiarism at the Pitt News update

A full eight days after bringing Scott Simeone's sentence-pilfering to her attention (see my original entry for background), Pitt News editor in chief Jessica Lear has finally addressed this issue in print. Below I have transcribed her letter, hidden as it was - I in fact had to transcribe it, since it mysteriously does not appear in the online version of the paper.

To the readers:

I’d like to extend my sincerest apologies for a column that ran Nov. 4 titled “Rhetoric against Israel unfair,” in which several lines were taken from the Anti-Defamation League’s web site without attribution. The editors were unaware of this plagiarism, and the employee has since been dismissed.

According to Pitt News policy, plagiarism is defined as “submitting another person’s work, whether previously published or not, as your own, or taking portions of another person’s work, and presenting them as your own in your work without properly attributing them to the person who created the work.” The consequence is that “the employee will be immediately fired from the newspaper and will never be permitted to work for the newspaper again.”

Jessica Lear
Editor in Chief


It is beyond me why it took better than a week for her to write 119 words, nearly half of which were merely reprinted from the Pitt News' ethics manual (yes, such a thing does apparently exist). Speaking of ethics, Ms. Lear has also thus fair failed to comply with her promise to print a letter that we submitted. Somebody send her a new pair of shoes, she's been dragging her feet so much.