Bob Hughes, former managing editor, sports columnist and publisher with the Regina Leader-Post, has filed his last column after getting busted for plagiarism.
I tend to make decisions quickly. But this one took a long time to come to a conclusion I would be happy with. The trigger came when I wrote a column for Friday's paper on Chief Clarence Louie, head of the Osoyoos Band in British Columbia. It described the band's successes and the chief's blunt assessment of why so many of his people live in crisis and poverty. I wrote the column after receiving an e-mail from a reader sending me a story that had been written about the chief. There was nothing in the e-mail to indicate who had written the story or where it had been published. I researched the band's efforts on the Internet and found the story to be accurate. But I didn't say who wrote the original story (Roy MacGregor) or where it had been published (The Globe and Mail). I was too lazy to go looking for it. Any columnist knows that you have to attribute this sort of thing. In this Internet age, the amount of widely available information has become infinite. But where the information originates and how reliable it is becomes of paramount importance. When the Leader-Post's remarkable Editor-In-Chief Janice Dockham called me about the column, I knew that it was totally the result of my lack of attention to one of the fundamental rules of journalism that saw me overlook attributing where much of my background information had come from. An apology to Roy and to you, Dear Readers, is hereby delivered.
University of Regina journalism professor ... noted that while the article Hughes copied from was written in 2006, in his version the date is removed and it says "not so long ago," instead.
"That tells me that there was an attempt there not only to not attribute but to make something to seem what it was not," she said. ...
The CBC asked managers at the Globe and Mail to comment. In an e-mail, they replied: "The Globe and Mail takes any instance of plagiarism very seriously. We are satisfied with the response of the Regina Leader-Post and its columnist Bob Hughes."
Hughes started at the L-P in 1962. He was sports editor when I joined the paper in 1988, but then became managing editor and publisher during my tenure. He was the guy who delivered the bad news to us on Black Saturday (more in this 2006 post).
I remembered him as a pretty decent guy when I worked there (he was generally bemused by the impressions that then-sportswriter Rob Vanstone and myself did of him). He got sent back down the ladder after Hollinger took over, getting demoted to editor-in-chief. He had retired from the paper but was contributing a column as a freelancer when this incident happened.
However, he was certainly a company man who insisted that the vicious cuts to the staff didn't hurt the quality of the newspaper -- a view not shared by many.
The CBC.ca report mentions an impaired driving conviction in recent months. I wonder (and this is betraying my own biases), if this is a function of the stresses within that could result from being a public team player when perhaps one's heart really isn't in the task.
In any event, what Hughes did was wrong, regardless of the level of mens rea involved. That type of intellectual dishonesty deserves punishment. He should have had the column taken away.
Hughes wrote:
"It's over. I'm done writing these things. I'm not getting out of it what I once did and I'm not putting into it what I once did. And I'm getting sloppy."
Then he was right to quit.
Addendum
Buckdog won't miss him a bit:
His attempts to denigrate Roy Romanow and praise of Grand Devine and Brad Wall were sickening. If ever there was a right wing-nut in Saskatchewan, it was Bob Hughes. In fact, Bob, for those hard working, law abiding people who live in this province and support the New Democrats, your ongoing attacks on us with your acidic, venomous political nastiness will long be remembered ... good riddance.
Others on the left feel the same way. From CBC.ca:
Over the years, union activists have decried what they call an anti-union slant in some of his columns.
Susan Butson, the shop steward at the Sobeys grocery store on Albert Street, said she won't miss Hughes' column and noted that when store workers were on strike for 450 days, Hughes wrote several columns about it.
"He made a lot of inaccurate comments and abusive comments, actually, towards myself and the other picketers," she said. "We were not impressed with him at all."
According to this Mediamelon post from February, there was even an anti-Hughes facebook group:
One such example is ‘Bob Hughes….it’s time to go’ whose stated goal is a quick retirement of the Regina Leader-Post columnist.
The group’s preamble does not mince words: ”His column is often used as a personal soapbox for relentless rants on daylight savings time, petty vendettas against workers, and updates on his conspiracy theories to turn Wascana Park into a personal toilet for geese.”
I guess the group will be disbanding now. Their work is done. :)