Reporters are listed in alphabetical order by last name.

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• Victoria Ilyinsky (The Harvard Crimson) – In October 2006, Harvard University’s campus newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, announced its discontinuation of senior Victoria Ilyinsky's column "On Language," citing Ms. Ilyinsky's failure to attribute the examples she used in an October 16 column about the evolving use of the word "literally" to a 2005 Slate magazine piece and to a blog.  In her article, headlined "The Word is Killing Me, Literally," Ms. Ilyinsky used, without attribution, the same quotations - one from Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" and another from F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" - that Jesse Sheidlower used in a 2005 Slate magazine column titled "The Word We Love to Hate, Literally."  Ms. Ilyinsky's column was canceled and the article removed from the paper's Web site when it emerged that a statement by Ms. Ilyinsky - "When an NFL sportscaster said last month, talking about the Giants comeback victory over the Eagles, that the winners had literally put a bullet in coach Andy Reid's head, I had a feeling there wasn't much shooting going on" - was lifted from a blog linked in Mr. Sheidlower's Slate piece.  "It turned out she hadn't seen the sportscast herself, and in the article she implied that she'd watched the game," the paper's president, William Marra, said of Ms. Ilyinsky. Mr. Marra said Ms. Ilyinsky's misrepresentation was a violation of Crimson standards.  Text Excerpted from: Eliana Johnson, “Harvard University Newspaper Fires a Cartoonist,” The New York Sun, October 31, 2006; Cara Grannemann & Eden Univer, “Harvard journalists accused of plagiarism,” Massachusetts Daily Collegian – University Wire, November 7, 2006.

• The Iraqi WMD Stories (New York Times) – The New York Times conceded in its pages that some of its prewar and early occupation coverage of Iraq had not been “as rigorous as it should have been.”  The paper criticized itself for relying too heavily on Iraqi defectors provided by Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress as sources; it named the deficient stories; and it berated itself for not re-examining the defectors’ claims as new information surfaced. Source: Slate.com, “Previously thought to be true,” June 4, 2004.

• Ivanhoe Broadcast News – In a March 16, 2006 article by Michael Stoll on the Grade The News web site, Stoll reported that syndicated multimedia medical reporter Dr. Dean Edell’s byline appeared at the top of press releases and TV reports that he did not report, film or write for the San Francisco television station KGO Channel 7.  Many of Edell’s stories were taken verbatim from a low-profile news service in Florida called Ivanhoe Broadcast News which mails out prepackaged video reports to more than 100 TV stations across the country and allows local reporters to put their names on stories they did not report without mentioning Ivanhoe.  Ivanhoe also permits stations omit geographical information, giving viewers the false impression that their stories were locally produced and the patients and doctors quoted in the stories could be their neighbors.  Paul Little, president of the National Association of Medical Communicators, was critical of this approach stating, “That’s plagiarism… I think the airing of any piece of video, when the viewer is not aware of the true source of the video, is unethical.”  Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute agreed saying, “Even if you do have the writer’s permission, it’s plagiarism… The problem is it’s a deception to the reader, saying that you’ve written this piece.”  For his part, Dr. Edell said he was less concerned about attribution than accuracy.  He said Ivanhoe has an excellent reputation inside the business, and he, an M.D., vets each story on its scientific merits.  Text excerpted from: Michael Stoll, “Prominent TV news doctor puts own name on pre-fab reports: San Francisco station also ran press releases under his byline on Web,” www.gradethenews.org, March 16, 2006.

• Jeff Jacoby (Boston Globe) – In July 2000, Jeff Jacoby, an editorial page columnist for the Boston Globe, was suspended for four months for not citing other sources in a July 3 piece on the signers of the Declaration of Independence.  Editorial page editor Renee Loth stopped short of calling his action "plagiarism." But the paper found that his July 3 column was based on accounts that have appeared "in other publications and books and on Web sites for years" and failed to alert readers to those other sources.  Sources: “Boston Globe suspends ed-page columnist,” The Quill, August 1, 2000; “Ethical Lapses,” American Journalism Review, March 2001 compiled by Lori Robertson and Christopher Sherman.

• Daniel Jeffreys (Daily Mail – U.K.) - Daniel Jeffreys, a Daily Mail reporter based in the US, who covered the execution of a British citizen, Tracy Housel, in Georgia. "On Tuesday night in Georgia," wrote Jeffreys, "Tracy Housel became the first British citizen in seven years to die in a US execution chamber. I watched as a witness through a glass screen in the neighboring room."  Only he didn't. Jeffreys, a gifted writer who delivered big features for his employer over many years, was with the rest of the British reporting pack in a car park outside and witnessed nothing on that March evening.  He might have got away with it. Unfortunately, several colleagues got angry calls from their editors wanting to know why they, too, had not witnessed the execution. The reporting pack turned quickly on one of its own and leaked the deception to the diary columns of The Guardian and The Independent. Source: Toby Moore, “Time for reflection: Dubious journalism damages careers,” Financial Times, May 22, 2004.

• Ian Johns (Times of London) – In May 2007, portions of an article about Hollywood romantic comedies written by Ian Johns of the Times of London were not properly attributed to Joe Neumaier who wrote about the same subject in the New York Daily News. Though the Times of London eventually acknowledged the error, there was no further explanation for the apparent plagiarism or punishment for the reporter responsible.  Source: Craig Silverman, "Sounds like plagiarism to us," Regret the Error, May 2007.

• Gregory M. Jones (Roswell Daily Record) – Jones, a sports editor of the Roswell (N.M.) Daily Record, was fired for fabricating part of a news story about a golf tournament in which he quoted a fictional character from the movie "Caddyshack."  Source: CBSNews.com, “Caddyshack Quote Smokes Editor,” July 7, 2003.

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