Do journalists have an inflated sense of their own importance? Gus Silber, the Mondi Magazine Awards convenor of judges, clearly thinks so. His view on the issue appears in quotation marks in an article by Hilary Prendini Toffoli in August 15th’s Mail & Guardian. If you’re inclined to check, it’s just after the part where Silber says he suspects there’s limited public interest in the Darrel Bristow-Bovey plagiarism thing, which in turn follows these words: ‘I fail to see any tangible connection between Darrel Bristow-Bovey and the journalist who almost brought the New York Times to its knees. The cartoonist was clearly drawing his own conclusions.”
That cartoon, which compares Bristow-Bovey to Jayson Blair, came from The Media’s July issue. The Saturday Star borrowed it to illustrate the story that first introduced Bristow-Bovey’s unacknowledged adaptation of passages from Bill Bryson’s ‘Notes from a Big Country’ to the general public. Reverting again to the abovementioned Mail & Guardian article, Prendini Toffoli suggests that while creative borrowing is commonplace, it’s good form to credit the source. So it might have been nice of her to give us a mention.
Of course, we’re not a mainstream title. Many who read the Saturday Star piece missed the fine print below the illustration, and are still oblivious to our existence. But while there are obvious disadvantages to our niche status, one plus is that we’re focused on a sector where the outcome of the Bristow-Bovey saga matters. We can’t be accused of inflating journalism’s significance at the expense of the public’s boredom.
Where do we stand, then? Like most commentators on the issue, we want to be perceived to be putting the principles before the personalities. To that end we’ve asked our legal contributors to give us their take on plagiarism.
And Bullard’s column at the back? Well, he’s now shouting about it because he wasn’t heard the first time. It’s the most simple of principles: credit the bloody source.