A veteran religion reporter tweeted last week that Fox News had stolen one of his finest stories without doing any reporting of its own and fully acknowledging his work on the story. Bobby Ross Jr. was counting on the story to attract readers to his website and give a boost to his small operation. The story concerned a doctor who was saved from Ebola with an experimental drug in 2014 and was about to go back to Africa to treat patients. Fox claimed the aggregation was within the bounds established by the company. Digital editor-in-chief Porter Barry wrote, “Our policy on aggregation and transparency is to always credit and link to the sources we cite and we did so in this article on Dr. Brantly.” (Poynter, July 29, 2019, by Kelly McBride)
Editor’s note: In 2018, The Washington Post fired a reporter for lack of diligence in attributing material and copying sentences from other publications. The Post did not say the reporter plagiarized but did say she failed to attribute facts from other articles leaving the impression she had done the reporting herself. (From The Washington Post, June 27, 2018)