Saturday, March 01, 2008
The Plagiarism God Hurls Down a Thunderbolt
Writers keep stealing, and Google keeps cutting off their hands.
The extraordinary thing about yesterday's White House aide flap is just how quickly it unfolded. Timothy Goeglein's newspaper column ran in the Fort Wayne News Sentinel on Thursday; at 7:38 Friday morning, Nancy Nall's blog entry eviscerated the piece with paragraph after paragraph of Google-linked damning evidence. By 11:12 Talking Points Memo picked it up, and by 2:08 the Washington Post reported that competing hometown paper Journal Gazette had a confession from Goeglein. By 2:38 the AP announced that the White House had issued a statement of "disappointment" in their aide; he resigned within about an hour, and by 4:31 word of his resignation had even gone international with a BBC story.
It probably tells you something about the hee-lariously arthritic pace of print media that, as of this morning, the News Sentinel website has not added any kind of, um, editorial note to the article that caused all this fuss. It's still just sitting there, innocent and apple-cheeked, edifying the fine folk of Fort Wayne.
The extraordinary thing about yesterday's White House aide flap is just how quickly it unfolded. Timothy Goeglein's newspaper column ran in the Fort Wayne News Sentinel on Thursday; at 7:38 Friday morning, Nancy Nall's blog entry eviscerated the piece with paragraph after paragraph of Google-linked damning evidence. By 11:12 Talking Points Memo picked it up, and by 2:08 the Washington Post reported that competing hometown paper Journal Gazette had a confession from Goeglein. By 2:38 the AP announced that the White House had issued a statement of "disappointment" in their aide; he resigned within about an hour, and by 4:31 word of his resignation had even gone international with a BBC story.
It probably tells you something about the hee-lariously arthritic pace of print media that, as of this morning, the News Sentinel website has not added any kind of, um, editorial note to the article that caused all this fuss. It's still just sitting there, innocent and apple-cheeked, edifying the fine folk of Fort Wayne.
