But even rewriting the work of others is nothing out of the ordinary. My first journalistic experience was a 1986 summer internship at the Los Angeles bureau of United Press International. The following year I had an internship at KNX, a CBS-owned news radio station in Los Angeles, where I wrote scripts for anchors to read on the air. Sometimes I did original reporting, but mostly I rewrote wire copy, some of which the wire services doubtless had rewritten from newspapers. The anchors never alerted listeners that the stories they were reading weren't entirely original.
Journalists routinely recycle enough to make any environmentalist proud.
The paper has an embarrassing recent history of ethical lapses. In June 1998 it forced columnist Patricia Smith to resign after she acknowledged fabricating characters and quotes in four columns. Two months later the Globe asked veteran columnist Mike Barnicle to resign after he used unattributed jokes from a book by comedian George Carlin. When Mr. Barnicle refused to quit, the paper instead suspended him for a month. Two weeks later he was forced to resign when he couldn't substantiate a story from a 1995 column.