Journalists Dancing on the Edge of Truth

[Commentary] Before writing this column on recent incidents of plagiarism and fabrication, I spent time on the Web reading all known thought on the subject, making notes as I went. When I wrote it up, I used those notes to help create something I am now claiming as my own. Yes, I made phone calls to relevant experts and did historical research, but in the main — columnists are in part human aggregators — everything written here reflects something that came before it. So does that make me a thief, or a journalist? It all comes down to execution. If I attribute the reporting of others and manage to steer clear of proprietary intellectual property while making a cogent argument, then I can live to write another day. If, on the other hand, I manufacture or manipulate quotes or fail to process the work of others through my own thinking and writing, then the Web — a crowd-sourced scrutiny machine — will find me out. My column will become a spectacle and I will end up in my boss’s office explaining myself.