Tag: plagiarism

Plagiarism at the ABC …

Lies, damned lies and ALP spin …

Consider this Emma Alberici paragraph …

Back to that $96 billion “Labor debt” inherited by the Howard government in 1996 – which actually comprised $40 billion of Fraser government debt that carried through the Hawke-Keating years taking the true level of Labor debt in 1996 to $56 billion. Bringing down that debt wasn’t all about constrained spending and higher taxes, in fact neither of those things were characteristics of the Howard-Costello years. Government asset sales between 1996 and 2007 worth $72 billion wiped the net debt out entirely with $16 billion to spare.

Read Sinclair Davidson on its history and innacuracy.

 

Could this be true …

Lord Justice Levenson recently brought down his report on the British press …

In his report the judge warned that inaccuracy in newspapers, “caused significant concern.” He also claimed that “The Independent was founded in 1986 by the journalists Andreas Whittam Smith, Stephen Glover and Brett Straub…”

The first two names are correct, but who is Brett Straub? His name first appeared in the Wikipedia entry on The Independent on 27 October 2011, when someone using the IP address 134.71.143.10 removed the name of Matthew Symonds, genuinely one of this newspaper’s three founding journalists, and inserted “Brett Straub”.

This was the only contribution to Wikipedia made from that IP address, which is registered in Pomona, in California. It may or may not be a coincidence that there is a Brett Straub on Facebook who graduated from Cal Poly, in Pomona, and describes himself as “a lazy bum like person who loves cars and hanging out with friends and family.”

The error stayed on the Wikipedia until it was spotted and corrected on 10 November this year – too late, unfortunately, to spare Lord Justice Leveson from being caught out making the basic error of cutting and pasting from Wikipedia without checking.

This is a quote from The Independent itself. I haven’t checked its accuracy …