Plagiarism in blogosphere runs amok; oxygen needed to breathe

In the blogosphere, plagiarism is the crutch that hacks who write for these sites—much like mine—use to pad the blank screen with grey words, without doing the heavy lifting of all that pesky research. Fine. But, TUAW [1] really takes the cake when it plagiarizes the story of a blog that plagiarized the story from yet another blog. Holy inbreeding, Batman!

In a story that a CNET blog wrote about Eisner’s keynote at whereeverthefuck, Eisner talks smack about Steve Jobs. Who cares, my point is then Engadget writes its story using all information from CNET’s blog, which is what shitty blogs do (again, like ours). But then, holy shit, TUAW brings the story to the Mac faithful, gives attribution—and link—to motherfucking Engadget [22. Both are AOL blogs.], before giving attribution to the real source (you know, that person who did all the pesky research) by incorrectly stating that Eisner’s interview was with the CNET blog. Eisner did not interview with CNET, the writer merely covered his keynote.

See for yourself: Here is TUAW’s writer, Mike Schramm, vomiting up previously upchucked vomit, with corrections added in italic by me to his inaccuracy:

Original

“From the ‘whatever you say, Eisner’ department, Engadget brings news that former Disney honcho Michael Eisner is blaming the guy who originally wore the black turtleneck and jeans for the Writers Guild of America strike, of all things. In an interview with a CNET blog that totally didn’t fucking happen, Eisner says that Steve Jobs is taking media companies ‘to the cleaners,’ and that Jobsy’s the one to blame [33. Wrong, again.] for the writers’ low pay on digital media distribution.”

Their “Read” link points to the original CNET story, which is why it isn’t linked in their first paragraph. But TUAW, don’t say “Engadget brings news…” because it didn’t bring the news, it upped chunks and you drank it.

Labels: Blogosphere