Here’s a good one:
The author of the book A War Against Truth has been accused of plagiarism.
In January Raincoast Books of Vancouver, the publisher of A War Against Truth: An Intimate Account of the Invasion of Iraq by Paul William Roberts, got word from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the book contains numerous “elements [that] . . . closely resemble or are indistinguishable from passages” in an article they published on Sept. 29, 2002. The article by Jay Bookman was titled “Bush’s real goal in Iraq: Invasion would mark the next step toward an American empire”
Initially the publisher was going insert a correction in the remaining copies but thought better of it and “decided that freezing the stock, then disposing of it “would be the most straightforward way” of handling the issue”. That’s 2,000 copies down the drain.
Oh and the book was a nominee for the $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for excellence in literary non-fiction and the author was the inaugural winner of a prize honoring courage in journalism by PEN Canada. Oops.
Here is the James Adams story in the Toronto Globe and Mail.
Also today CBS fired one of the producers of Katie Couric’s show for plagiarizing an article from the Wall Street Journal. At issue is a one-minute video essay on libraries that Couric did that was lifted from Zaslow’s article “Of the Places You’ll Go , Is the Library Still One of Them?”
Last month it was Ben Schott’s essay “Confessions of a Book Abuser” that held the torch. He borrowed from Anne Fadiman’s essay “Never Do That to a Book”
Coincidently, the world’s first plagiarism museum opened this month in Cologne, Germany.
“The Museum Plagiarius…will permanently exhibit 300 original products together with seemingly identical rip-offs.” Products “range from fashion and household products to electrical and medical equipment.”
Maybe they should open a literary wing.
Business Week article “Stop Faking It” by Rachel Tiplady.