Mea culpas all round at Guardian towers this weekend. The paper has had to apologise after coincidence-happy tech hack Charles Arthur was accused of plagiarising a Reuters story. Again.
Arthur’s report on a Cisco telecoms deal looked remarkably similar to Steve Stecklow’s Reuters exclusive from a day earlier. When accused of lifting the story by an American journalism school Arthur went on the defensive, insisting that he had second-sourced the original story. That didn’t satisfy his boss.
Guardian comms chief Richard Lindsay said in a statement that Arthur’s name only appeared in the byline in error, again, and that it had now been corrected to “staff and agencies”. The paper admits that “the original byline did not reflect that the article was substantially based on a Reuters story”, and has issued a grovelling apology to Reuters. This is becoming a regular occurrence…
