More on Plagiarising

One of the things we do at a site where I am one of the contributing editor is exactly what Nancy did. One minute of work that snowballed and finished the career of White House aide Tim Goeglein in 12 hours after the blog came out. Read on here:

Gone in 60 SecondsHow my blog started the avalanche that buried presidential aide Tim Goeglein.By Nancy Nall Derringer
Tim Goeglein

I spent much of last Friday being congratulated for "brilliant reporting" that consisted of a minute's worth of typing on my laptop. That's how long it took for me to notice what seemed to be merely a case of egregiously obscure name-dropping ("A notable professor of philosophy at Dartmouth College in the last century, Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey, expressed the matter succinctly. …"), paste the name into Google, and discover the entire sentence, Rosenstock-Hussey and all, had been lifted from a previously published essay by Jeffrey Hart in the Dartmouth Review.

The plagiarism was in a column for a newspaper I used to work for, the News-Sentinel of Fort Wayne, Ind. The piece was a guest op-ed about the importance of a good college education written by Timothy S. Goeglein, a top aide to President Bush. A Fort Wayne native, he was a hometown boy made good, hired by Karl Rove in the Office of Public Liaison. Goeglein was the White House's go-between to religious groups, a "pipeline to the president," as the Washington Post called him. Why he felt the need to contribute entirely nonpolitical columns to the hometown paper, and to the one with the smaller circulation (Fort Wayne is the smallest two-daily market in the country), was, until last Friday, a mystery.