The cardinal sin of journalism

   I hardly slept at all the other night. Of all the stories I have written in my 25-year journalism career, the one I posted a few days ago on our web site was by far the most gut-wrenching of my life.
    I knew full well the ramifications of accusing another reporter of plagiarism. A reporter is only as good as his or her reputation. An accusation of plagiarism is perhaps the most devastating arrow that can be slung at a journalist.
    I tried to give the Brockton Enterprise a way out. Two hours before I published a story accusing Enterprise correspondent Kelly Onanian of plagiarizing my piece on the arraignment of former Wareham High School athletic director Buddy Carlson, I sent another e-mail to managing editor Steve Damish. Until that point, the Enterprise had ignored multiple E-mails I had sent on Sunday regarding Onanian’s story, which appeared in the Sunday Enterprise and later on the Courier’s web site. This time I informed Damish that I would be publishing something on-line about the incident at 3 p.m. and asked either for an official statement from the Enterprise or for a compelling reason not to publish the story at all.
    I wasn’t seeking litigation against the Enterprise, although my company’s copyright was clearly violated. In my earlier E-mails, I simply asked for the Enterprise to publicly acknowledge the mistake and for Onanian to write a letter of apology to me. The sin of plagiarism is a grave one in journalism. Frankly, I thought I was letting Onanian and the Enterprise off easily.
    Damish called at 3:10 p.m. I had given the Enterprise an extra 10 minutes in the hope we could reach some amicable resolution. But Damish spent the next few minutes trying to convince me that the similarities in the two stories were just a remarkable coincidence. Then he suggested that there was no way that Onanian could have read my story because she’s from Wareham and there was a power outage in town Friday night, even though Onanian filed her story with the Enterprise at 9:08 on Saturday morning.
    According to NStar, there was a power outage among 24 homes near Mechant’s Way in Wareham on Friday afternoon. The problem was resolved by 7 p.m. No other incident of a power outage was recorded.
    That’s when I knew this was an attempt to cover-up an embarrassing mistake. For the managing editor of a daily newspaper to claim one of his reporters could not have accessed the Internet from Friday afternoon until Saturday morning is absolutely absurd. Assuming Onanian did lose power at her home, she could have a lap top with wireless internet access. She could have gone to somebody’s house. The power was only out for about four hours. Did Damish really expect me to believe that Onanian had no opportunity to go on-line at any point before or after that?
    In fact, Damish may have provided a clue to what could have actually happened. Instead of writing her story on Friday night, Onanian may have waited until Saturday morning. Realizing she was running out of time, it is a distinct possibility that she went to our web site and cut and pasted chunks of my story and tried to pass it off as hers. According to our web site data, there were six hits on our Buddy Carlson story between 7 and 9 a.m. on Saturday.
    Regardless of when Onanian filed her story, entire passages from my story appeared in her version nearly word-for-word. Damish tried to tell me Onanian and I had copied from the same portion of the court records. That’s a flat-out lie. I took information from the court records and completely re-wrote it. During one 40-word stretch of my story, Onanian copied 35 words in the exact same order.
This isn’t about being petty. It’s about journalistic integrity. I was willing to forgive Onanian for making a mistake. But the upper management of the Enterprise should be ashamed of itself for denying the obvious and pursuing a ham-handed attempt to cover the whole thing up.
    Plagiarism is a very serious offense in journalism. There is supposed to be a sacred trust between newspapers and the communities they cover. A journalist cannot copy another journalist’s story and try to pawn it off as his or her own. That’s about integrity. It’s also about copyright infringement. But the greater sin was committed by the Enterprise management. If they had the moral courage to simply say to me, "Hey, our reporter screwed up and forgot to attribute the Observer. We’re very sorry. It won’t happen again," I would have been inclined to just let this go, as long as Onanian wrote a letter of apology to show she understood why what she did was wrong. But instead the Enterprise tried to sweep the whole thing under the rug. Ryan Richardson of the Wareham Courier even wrote a new version of the story that is now appearing on the Courier web site. Why would that have been necessary if the was nothing wrong with Onanian’s story?
    As a journalist, this whole thing offends me. Newspapers are supposed to be in the truth business. If one paper can brazenly copy large portions of a story from another paper and refuse to be held accountable for it, it’s a sad, sad day for a business I love with all my heart.