CBS News had to apologize for a Katie Couric video essay that had essentially been a rip-off of a Wall Street Journal article. Quick question: Is it really a Katie Couric essay if it was written by a CBS producer?
CBS has fired the producer who wrote the piece for Ms. Couric, and said yesterday it was investigating to see if the producer, whose name CBS has not disclosed, had written any previous commentaries for Ms. Couric that had been plagiarized.
The commentary, about how children use libraries in a world increasingly dominated by the Internet, was clearly inspired by a piece written the previous month in The Wall Street Journal. A Journal editor called the similarities to the attention of CBS News on Monday, and executives there, reading the two pieces, immediately concluded that they were basically identical.
CBS News executives said they were stunned that anyone would so blatantly copy someone else’s work. The incident is an embarrassment for the news division, and comes at a time of continuing struggle for Ms. Couric’s newscast to be competitive with NBC and ABC in the evening-news ratings. ...
A spokesman for ABC News, Jeffrey W. Schneider, said that on ABC’s Web site commentaries were written only by the contributor whose name was on that commentary.
Allison Gollust of NBC News said she was not aware of any NBC Web contributions that were written by anyone other than the person whose name was attached to it. “We certainly do not have anyone on the staff whose job it is to write something like that for one of our anchors or correspondents,” she said.