A Debate About Plagiarism - Article Example

Plagiarism In the article “A Debate About Plagiarism as The Times Investigates a Case” Margaret Sullivan sheds light on the issue of plagiarism and the way it is being widely spread nowadays. She provides a vivid example, pointing to the story of The Times reporter, Carol Vogel, who had written a short passage about arts, which is almost similar to the one in Wikipedia (Sullivan, 2014). She is ashamed that modern reporters may simply copy and paste, and that would be enough for the journalists seemingly.

Sullivan also shows the example of Ben Johnson, editor at BuzzFeed, who was fired due to plagiarism. Sullivan shares that “At least one prominent writer doesn’t think what happened at BuzzFeed is such a big deal,” (Sullivan, 2014). Gene Weingarten from Washington Post stresses that plagiarism is theft. I agree that a person has to write their own ‘stuff,’ as Sullivan named it, otherwise it is compulsory to provide links and references. There is intellectual property, thus, withdrawing it is theft.

Everyone who writes has to be capable of combining, mixing, and synthesizing information taken from different sources. In case nothing new is brought up, what is the deal? Such writing has no value. Even though there are things to be shared, own prism of the writer has to be present anyway. I cannot say that using the information provided by others is bad; I suppose it is useful as there were many bright thoughts by the thinkers of the past and present. Anyway, it is essential to refer to an actual author of the idea, not pretending to be the false owner of it.