- Tue Jul 10, 2012 5:09 pm
#241751
Of course, they wouldn't be inviting yet more online warriors to abuse her now they've been deprived of the Facebook attack site, would they?
David Tribby wrote:Maybe they've clean up their act a bit after all that scrutiny.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?It said the soldier, understood to be a member of 35 Engineers, had asked to search the security officer.
satnav wrote:This story seems to have been lifted word for word from 'The Sun'. There seems to be very little evidence to back up the story but every time a another paper repeats the story it gives it more credence.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... iller.html
I'll wait for the facts before jumping to conclusions based on "allegedly", the solider hasnt pressed charges, so we will never know the truth.
- Gazza, England , 30/7/2012 12:23
Click to rate Rating 117
I Recently returned from a trip to Iraq, and wrote an article for the Times on the desecration of Commonwealth war cemeteries in the southern cities of Amara and Basra. ... By 6am, less than five hours after the Times put it online, a remarkably similar story had appeared on Mail Online, the world's biggest and most successful English-language website with 200 million unique visitors a month.
The article ran under the byline of someone called Euan McLelland, who describes himself on his personal website as a "driven, proactive and reliable multi-media reporter". Alas, he was not driven or proactive enough to visit Iraq himself. His story was lifted straight from mine – every fact, every quote, every observation, the only significant difference being the introduction of a few errors and some lyrical flights of fancy. McLelland's journalistic research extended to discovering the name of a Victoria Cross winner buried in one of the cemeteries – then getting it wrong.
Within the trade, lifting quotes and other material without proper acknowledgement is called plagiarism. In the wider world it is called theft. As a freelance, I had financed my trip to Iraq (though I should eventually recoup my expenses of nearly £1,000). I had arranged a guide and transport. I had expended considerable time and energy on the travel and research, and had taken the risk of visiting a notoriously unstable country. Yet McLelland had seen fit not only to filch my work but put his name on it. In doing so, he also precluded the possibility of me selling the story to any other publication.
I'm being unfair, of course. McLelland is merely a lackey. His job is to repackage and regurgitate. He has no time to do what proper journalists do – investigate, find things out, speak to real people, check facts. As the astute media blog SubScribe pointed out, on the same day that he "exposed" the state of Iraq’s cemeteries McLelland also wrote stories about the junior doctors’ strike, British special forces fighting Isis in Iraq, a policeman's killer enjoying supervised outings from prison, methods of teaching children to read, the development of odourless garlic, a book by Lee Rigby's mother serialised in the rival Mirror, and Michael Gove's warning of an immigration free-for-all if Britain brexits. That's some workload.
It's all a case of outwitting the foreigns. Brex[…]