Sounds Familiar

On more than one occasion I have talked about how much I hate it when the local news mentions a story which doesn't qualify as news to anyone but people who work at that station. My favorite example to use is when the local Fox affiliate talks about the "American Idol" results more than a water main break which knocked out power to 5 blocks. (Then again, it is not like talking about it helps any one living on those blocks because they don't have the ability to see it.) Still, I believe that just because a show is popular that doesn't make it newsworthy and that time should be spent talking about something which actually affects the people in the viewing area. In that moment they aren't the local news, but the local network mouth piece. (The worst example of this ever happened a few years ago when several stations ran the same tape which looked to be a legitimate news piece until someone did some actual reporting and discovered it was essentially an infomercial for a sponsor.) Still, at least those anchors can still hang their heads slightly high because they still wrote the original copy leading in to the news story. Not everyone can make that same claim.

Most people watching their local news probably assume that someone at the studio is writing every piece of copy, but it is actually pretty common for stations to "borrow" stories from somewhere else, usually the network headquarters. In some instances it just makes sense - if it's a small station with an even smaller budget they can't very well afford to send a reporter to cover something making International headlines, so everyone works with the same tape and the reporter does a generic sign-off. That I can live with, because it beats the alternative of a story not getting any coverage. It is when people graduate from borrowing as a cost saving measure and switch to doing it because they are lazy that I get a little worried. Using video from an outside reporter is different because it is not like you can claim it was original reporting - everyone can see it isn't someone who works at the station. But since no one signs their scripts that same built-in system of crediting the person who did all the work doesn't apply. Until Conan O'Brien started putting together these clips I'm sure station managers thought no one would notice (which is how all plagiarism starts). Unfortunately for them, nothing stays hidden for long anymore.

I understand that there are only so many ways to write about the same subject and some overlap is going to happen. But there is overlap and then there is cutting and pasting, which is what this is. This blatant copying just illustrates the difference between print and TV journalism, because using someone else's words without giving proper credit can be career-ending in the newspaper business, whereas it is pretty obviously a wide-spread practice over on the TV side. This is why many newscasters are just seen a professional readers instead of journalists. (Not saying they are all that way, but it is a matter of guilt by association.) That is why if I ran a station I would be very wary of letting my people do this because it creates doubt in a viewers mind which doesn't need to be there. The last thing you want people with multiple news options to be doing is worrying that if your station plagiarizes from one report, what is stopping you from plagiarizing them all? Since these stations were all over the board in terms of network affiliation I'm sure they were taken off some wire service that the stations had paid to use but, honestly, how long does it take you to write an original first sentence?