Wednesday, April 11, 2007

The perky one in a plagiarism flap?

So that's what the megabucks at CBS News had in mind when they hired her away from Today? From Breitbart/AP:
A CBS News producer was fired and the network apologized after a Katie Couric video essay on libraries was found to be plagiarized from The Wall Street Journal.

The essay was removed from the CBS Web site and an editor's note was posted saying the item should have credited Jeffrey Zaslow of the Journal, the network said Tuesday.

The essays are carried regularly on "Couric & Co.," the anchor's blog on the CBS News Web site. Couric and producers meet once a week to decide on topics and the producers write them for Couric to read on camera.

An editor for The Wall Street Journal called CBS News to point out the similarities of the April 4 notebook item to Zaslow's article, headlined "Of the Places You'll Go, Is the Library Still One of Them?" The pieces talk about how libraries are seen differently by children from their parents.

"We were horrified," CBS News spokeswoman Sandra Genelius said. "It was almost verbatim."

CBS would not identify the producer fired for the transgression.

Apparently at CBS News, when they're not using someone else's fake documents, they're stealing someone else's real ones. On the bright side, the fired producer now qualifies to be a Democrat Senator from Delaware.