The McGill Daily has recently been accused of plagiarism by McGill student and blogger Adam Mahler. Last week, Mahler referred concerns over a feature that ran in the Jan. 7 issue of The Daily to the Society of Professional Journalists' Ethics Committee. The committee returned an advisory opinion on Monday stating essentially that the article contains plagiarized content, which Mahler posted on his blog, Daily Watch (
http://dailywatch.wordpress.com).
"They had an e-mail discussion [about the situation]. The answer that came back was really black and white," Mahler said. "They said basically, 'This is plagiarism because the analysis is copied and the phrases are copied.'"
In a blog post dated Jan. 27, Mahler, pointed out that Daily Features editor Martin Lukacs's piece, "Sparing the Rich, Taxing the Poor", contains phrasing, content and analysis similar to text that appeared in several articles published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. In previous posts, Mahler elaborated on the charges and revealed further incidents of plagiarism in other articles written by Lukacs that were later acknowledged in errata by The Daily.
"It was lazy and sloppy of me," Lukacs said of the Jan. 7 article. "But I think Mahler's accusations about me deliberately finding words that were really, really effective and using them is inaccurate. It has more to do with my note-taking process and my rewriting; I just didn't do it well enough and it was pretty sloppy of me."
The Lukacs feature addressed the question of how progressive Canada's taxation system really is. In one particular passage of Lukacs' feature, phrases are borrowed from several CCPA articles that were written mainly by Marc Lee, an economist at the CCPA's British Columbia office, and Andrew Jackson, senior economist of the Canadian Labour Congress.
The Daily has not yet run a retraction or errata on the piece.
"It didn't seem like it was necessary," said Daily Coordinating Editor Drew Nelles. "This is a gray area and something to be avoided, but there was an attribution right there in the article. Also, there's something called the four-word rule in plagiarism-where if there are four non-technical words that appear in a sentence that appear in the original source-which is not the case here."
Viewing Comments 1 - 4 of 4
Joseph
posted 2/12/08 @ 9:43 AM EST
Hah... they're not even original commies...
Daily Watch guy
Adam
posted 2/19/08 @ 1:28 AM EST
The Daily got the Public Editor to respond to these allegations
http://mcgilldaily.com/view.php?aid=7062
He distorted some things and made an argument that the Ethics Committee members of the Society for Professional Journalists who responded did not have complete information. (Continued…)
Daily Watch guy
Adam
posted 2/19/08 @ 2:30 AM EST
From Nerissa Young, of the Ethics Committee of the SPJ:
_______
I am heartened that such a discussion is occurring on your campus. Usually, plagiarism does not arise from evil intentions, per se, but a lack of education about it. (Continued…)
Daily Watch guy
Adam
posted 2/19/08 @ 2:32 AM EST
From Mike Farrell, of the Ethics Committee of the SPJ:
__________
For me, the answer to your question come from this passage of your original email to us:
"For most of the piece, he paraphrased and rearranged things well enough, but a few passages showed him deliberately taking phrases from two other authors' works, including some untechnical, descriptive language that he obviously worked to keep because he found it persuasive. (Continued…)
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