Some Late-Breaking Events

1. Wow, Danehy really phoned it in this week, didn’t he?

   His column is basically just a high school plagiarist’s rewrite of Laurie Roberts’ August 25 column in the Arizona Republic. Yeah, he changed a few of the words around and added his own brand of snark, but basically anyone who had read Roberts’ column could sit down and rewrite it to produce something identical to Danehy’s. (For starters, there are basically no actual facts in Danehy’s column that didn’t already appear in Roberts’.)

   I hope you’re not paying him, and if you are, I hope he at least goes up to Phoenix and buys dinner for her. It’s the least he can do, since she wrote his column this week.

2. Did Laurie Roberts’ AZ-Rep column include the anecdote about the woman who got heroin on a bus?

   If so then Danehy has massive balls.

3. I’m somewhat puzzled by these remarks. Yes, I read Laurie Roberts’ column. She did a good job. Are you saying that if two people write about the same thing on different days, whoever did it later is a plagiarist? I could show you dozens (if not hundreds) of examples of one columnist picking up a story from another source and writing about it. In fact, how else would a columnist come up with topics? We all read, watch TV, hear things on the radio, get e-mail from people, hear talk on the street…but we don’t get things from Wikipedia.

   As for the facts lining up, that’s why they call them facts. I did my own checking (not that I needed to; Roberts is first-rate, but it was right for me to do so) and the facts are the facts. I think it would only be blog-worthy if my “facts” were different from hers.

   So, yes, she wrote about it first (in Phoenix) and I wrote about it (in Tucson) after she did. In all seriousness, would you be less offended if I started the column with, “Hey, I read about this horrible thing in a Phoenix paper, so let me pass it along to you…”?

   The heroin anecdote is mine, but if Laurie Roberts wants to write about it, I won’t call her a plagiarist. And ZamFear (that’s a great name!), far too many parts of me are massive.

   Take care.

   Tom

4. Dearest Tom Danehy,
   Please only write about subjects that have never been discussed in the media (or only minimally so).

   This means you can write about some rare plutonium isotopes, the lost choral works of the composer Faure, 15th century elephantiasis cases in Spain, the poetry of the guy who played Gopher on “The Love Boat,” recipes for making soup from the Mzungi root of Madagascar, astronomical controversies regarding the red-shift chemial analysis of galaxies XJ-312 and XJ-935B, and of course, the proper way to get a sea lion to stop humping a kayak.

   Writing about anything else is pure Jayson Blairism and makes you a big fat PLAGIARIST and LOSER!!!

5. I won’t debate it here, since Jimmy asked me not to.

6. Kynn: Now, don’t go making snarky comments implying that I censored you. What actually happened is that I asked you in the future to only comment on the blog post in question, as per our comments policy. And I also said that in this case, I was leaving your comments up, because I missed them at first. So, in this case, feel free to debate.

7. Jimmy–Regarding your No. 6 comment, in the enhanced version of the site it might be good to allow readers to comment on each story. But then again, you might get buried in the sort of vicious, stupid crap that piles up at the Star and Citizen sites, and moderating it could be a nightmare…

8. Hi, Jimmy — You asked me not to comment in off-topic posts, so I figured that responding here would be the same. I never said I was censored.

   As far as the two oddly similar stories — with the exception of the heroin-on-the-bus story — I can only point to this week’s Media Watch column. I think it would have been a decent idea to credit the original source, honestly. Especially since there seem to be few other news sources addressing Gilbert; it’s not like she’s being talked about all over the place.

   Near as I can tell, she was written about by Roberts last month, and this month by Danehy in a column which follows pretty much the exact same structure, facts, and opinion as Roberts’, with the addition of the oddly out-of-place heroin story.

   Now, Tom says he did his own checking, and hey, I’ll believe that he did, even though there’s not much to show for his research skills in the article.

   I’ve written regular columns for papers myself, and I know what goes into it; I know that you’ll often take bits and pieces from things you’ve read.

   But to me, a column needs to be more than simply rewriting someone else’s opinion piece because you agree with what they said. Here’s a link to the Aug. 25 column; I think it’s worth reading over to see if you agree that it’s just a rewrite, or if Danehy has brought something new to the story.

   I stand by my original comment, although I do apologize to Jimmy twice; first, for posting off-topic, and secondly for the mistaken impression that he was censoring me, which is not what I meant to imply.

   PS: To Guvner, I think this particular incident would qualify as “never been discussed in the media (or only minimally so)” — given that apparently only Roberts ever discussed it, until Tom’s rewrite.

   PS/2: James, that’s my worry. I am afraid that story-by-story comments may lead to the cesspool effect seen at the Star and Citizen.

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