UH OH! Veteran N&O Reporter Fired After Years of Plagiarism Come To Light

RALEIGH – When covering the news, reporters gather information from all kinds of sources and often ones covering the very story in question. When passing along specific takes on news developments from other sources it is considered poor form to not attribute it, in some fashion, to the original author – especially when it’s verbatim.

A veteran reporter with the haughty, and reliably Leftist, Raleigh News & Observer, Anne Blythe, evidently did not subscribe to those journalistic conventions.

(FROM the Associated Press via YAHOO NEWS 😉

“The News & Observer announced Anne Blythe’s departure on its website this week. Executive Editor Robyn Tomlin wrote that the Raleigh newspaper found at least a dozen instances of Blythe taking phrases, sentences or whole paragraphs from other outlets without properly attributing the information.

[…]

The newspaper was adding a note to online versions of each story identified in the probe saying which outlets the uncredited material came from. Those stories range from Supreme Court decisions affecting the state to a reward offered for information on the killing of an endangered red wolf.

The newspaper examined 600 of Blythe’s stories published since January 2016 after a reporter from another outlet complained. Tomlin and publisher Sara Glines declined to say Friday which publication alerted them.”

After 30 years or reporting, perhaps at some point Blythe just decided to phone it in.

The interesting thing about it is that grabbing content from other sources, unattributed, was a fireable violation of journalistic integrity from the N&O’s perspective, while the slanted, misrepresentative furthering of Leftist political narratives under the guise of a neutral news publication perfectly acceptable, if not preferred.