Scott Taylor, a very high-profile Canadian sports columnist, left his long-term gig at the Winnipeg Free Press after being accused plagiarism.
Plagiarism is considered a major journalistic sin. If true, who in the Canadian media universe would give such a man a second chance?
Step forward, National Post!
The Toronto Star's Antonia Zerbisias deals with the situation in her Sunday column. An excerpt:
As reported by the Star's Chris Zelkovich 10 days ago, Taylor, best known in these parts as a commentator on The Score sports cable channel, is authoring a Monday column from Winnipeg on a freelance basis.
Word from the Post is that editor-in-chief Matthew Fraser and sports editor Jim Bray, who both fought against the hiring, lost out to publisher Les Pyette who has been in the job since Dec. 6. Sources say that some high-profile writers have threatened to walk out over Taylor's appearance in the paper.
But, in a phone interview on Friday, Pyette made no apologies for hiring Taylor over newsroom objections.
Calling Taylor "an icon in the sports fraternity," Pyette said that what happened at the Free Press had nothing to do with the Post: "We've all made mistakes."
True enough — and let me not be the one to cast the first journalistic stone.
More importantly, there are far graver journalistic sins than plagiarism: not questioning obviously bogus claims about Saddam Hussein's stores of weapons of mass destruction, or not reporting the true death toll in Iraq, or giving millions of dollars of free publicity to false allegations about a presidential candidate's military service or treating certain Canadian political parties as a joke or devoting valuable airtime to B-list celebrities or meaningless murder trials or ignoring whole corners of the globe because stories of hundreds of children being orphaned every damn day because of AIDS don't make for entertaining TV.