COM 209, 317: Ethics, libraries and Katie Couric

In the news this week is an online essay by CBS News anchor Katie Couric. Well, uh, let's make that attributed to CBS anchor Katie Couric. Turns out the essay was plagiarized, and CBS has egg all over its face. The essay was about kids and libraries, and much of it was taken word for word from The Wall Street Journal.

Nice timing, huh? Just as we're reading the Missouri Group's chapter on ethics.

Here's Howard Kurtz, media columnist for The Washington Post:

In an Editor's Note posted online and distributed to CBS stations, the network said "much of the material" in the library commentary came from Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow, "and we should have acknowledged that at the top of our piece. We offer our sincere apologies for the omission."

What made the ripoff especially striking was the personal flavor of a video -- now removed from the CBS Web site -- that began, "I still remember when I got my first library card, browsing through the stacks for my favorite books."

Kurtz is a good reporter. If you're interested in the news media, you ought to get in the habit of reading him anyway. He doesn't tell us about plagiarism. He shows us plagiarism:

Much of the rest of the script was stolen from the Journal. Couric said: "For kids today, the library is more removed from their lives. It's a last-ditch place to go if they need to find something out."

Zaslow wrote in March: "The library is more removed from their lives. It's a last-ditch place to go if they need to find something out."

Couric said: "Sure, children still like libraries, but books aren't the draw."

Zaslow wrote: "Sure, there are still library-loving children, but books aren't necessarily the draw."

And so on, and so on. Enough to make the point crystal clear.

A later story by the Reuters news agency explained how it happened:

Although the text for the minutelong video was written in first person -- introduced by Couric with the line "I still remember when I got my first library card" -- Couric did not compose the piece herself and was unaware that much of it was plagiarized, Genelius said.

"She was stunned and very upset," Genelius said Wednesday. "It's the same reaction we all had."

* * *

Genelius said Couric met with a group of producers weekly to discuss upcoming topics for her "Notebook" video essays, and "she does write some of them herself."

"Sometimes the text is written by the producer," she added. "That's the way television generally works. It's a very collaborative medium."

Maybe a little too collaborative.

What are the ethics of plagiarism? That's easy. There aren't any. But what are the ethics of having anonymous staffers write stuff for a news anchor? (Disclaimer: When I was doing public relations for an elected state official, I wrote "by-liner" pieces that went out over his signature.) What are the ethics of anybody's writing anything under somebody else's name?