NPR Shares Without Asking Permission
There was a rather interesting brouhaha at your favorite station, NPR, that's worth taking a quick look at today. Sorry, this doesn't involve the liberal bias so many of you hear in their reporting (and thank you for the continuing e-mails on this subject). Instead, this is about possible plagiarizing.
As the Internet continues to become the go-to place for news, hi-jinx and information, plagiarism (stealing somebody else's work and calling it your own) has positively flourished.
In this case, NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard types the play-by-play of what could have been an Abbott and Costello routine she called a case of 'accidental plagiarism' at the station three weeks ago.
Long story short, on May 5, NPR ran a lighthearted piece on its Morning Edition show illustrating how cell phones seem to always fail just as they are needed most -- or when the villain is closing in for the kill. It was titled "In Horror Flicks, the Cell Phone Always Dies First."
I actually heard this one, and thought it pretty clever at the time. Well, it turns out the piece sounded a lot like a popular YouTube video put together by Rich Juzwiak called "No Signal" last year.