Freelance writer and editor Nancy Nall Derringer was reading a column in the News-Sentinel of Fort Wayne by Tim Goeglein, top Bush aide, when she came across this line:
A notable professor of philosophy at Dartmouth College in the last century, Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey, expressed the matter succinctly…
She thought it was “merely a case of egregiously obscure name-dropping,” so she googled the line to see how ‘notable’ the professor really was.
Upon googling, she found that the entire sentence was lifted completely from an article in the Dartmouth Review.
After she posted her findings on her blog, she and readers of her blog searched around at other columns written by Goegien. By the end of the day, they found that 20 out of 38 of his columns since 2000 have been “cut-and-paste columns.”
Goeglein resigned less than 12 hours after Derringer’s post, she reports.
Most ironic part of this story: Goegien spelled the professor’s name wrong. If he would’ve spelled the professor's name correctly then his column would’ve been buried in google, but his spelling error revealed his plagiarism.
It’s amazing how this columnist’s journalistic career, as Derringer’s title implies, lost all its integrity in 60 seconds.
Blogs are the new everything. Just add fierce media watchdog and career-destroyer to the list.
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