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Mon Jan 3/05
It’s just sports, right?
Good gravy,
how did this
get past me? According to William Houston, disgraced sports
columnist Scott Taylor — he of the Winnipeg Free Press
article plagiarized from USA Today, among other sources
— has been hired to write on Mondays in the hallowed pages of
the National Post, a paper recently known for aggressively
terminating plagiarists. What I could never understand about
the Taylor case was that the stories focused entirely on the
fact that he took a quote from one guy and attributed it to
another. He did, but holy cats, who cares? Most
of that article was plagiarized, obviously deliberately, and
from multiple sources. The only reason I can think of that it
wasn’t a bigger story was because news organs were too lazy to
get their hands on a paper copy of the Free Press, which
doesn’t publish online or to any searchable index that I can
locate. IrrRegardless [not a word, thank you
very much Ian -ed.], hiring him — especially now, possibly
ever — would be indefensible. If it’s true, the Post has
some serious explaining to do.
To
be fair, though, Chris Zelkovich has just as much explaining to
do for calling Pierre McGuire “one of the best analysts in the
game.” Pierre McGuire is the worst at pretty much everything
he does, and I don’t know anyone who disagrees with me. He’s
obnoxious, smug, repetitive (is a single Canadian still unclear
as to McGuire’s position on two-line offside?), and frequently
wrong (particularly as regards the snide remarks he’s made
about the officiating at the ongoing World Juniors, which I
think has been excellent). To top it all off, he’s a
cartoonish homer, and the worst kind of homer, too — one who
thinks he isn’t. Clearly sportswriters, and their editors,
inhabit a plane of existence entirely separate from my own.
[UPDATE
Wed Jan 5/05: William Houston goes
into further detail today. Taylor, after reading one of the
offending articles: "I just feel sick to my stomach.]
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