CNN Fires Editor Over Multiple Instances of Plagiarism

It is becoming plagiarism Friday. See these previous posts.
Today CNN announced the ouster of Marie-Louise Gumuchian, a former editor who wrote mainly about international news. According to an Editor’s note on the CNN website, CNN discovered about 50 articles with plagiarized material. According to the Washington Post, there were 128 separate instances of plagiarized material in those 50 articles. The investigation is ongoing.
Some articles have been completely removed. Some, like this one on the crisis in Ukraine, contain a disclaimer at the end of the article:

Editors’ Note: This article has been edited to remove plagiarized content after CNN discovered multiple instances of plagiarism by Marie-Louise Gumuchian, a former CNN news editor.

I have not been able to track down pre-edited versions of these articles to see what material was lifted from another source. The several articles I have located are not available on the Wayback Machine or in Google cache.
Gumuchian might have been better off to write for a Christian publisher. Especially if she had a large media buying audience, she might have gotten off by saying “mistakes were made.
 
 
 

On Being a Ghostwriter Without Knowing It

Comedian Danny Murphy today relates a story of having some of his material end up in several sources without attribution.
He provided detail about his interactions with magachurch pastor Craig Groeschel. Groeschel, pastor of LifeChurch.tv, modified the material for use in a book on marriage. That first book went out of print but a newer book still includes the material and the publisher did make the correction.
Murphy learned of the situation through listening to a sermon where the preacher quoted his material. When Murphy told the pastor about the citation, the pastor didn’t believe him!

Mark Driscoll Plagiarism Update: Dan Allender Gets a Footnote in Real Marriage

In January 2014, I noted that Thomas Nelson/Harper Collins Christian added Dan Allender’s name to the Acknowledgments section of Mark & Grace Driscoll’s book Real Marriage. Use of Allender’s styles of relating without citation was one of the early allegations of plagiarism made by Janet Mefferd after the infamous November, 2013 interview.
In my post demonstrating the addition of Allender’s name to the Acknowledgments section, I expressed my view that the publisher should also add a footnote to the section where Allender’s material was used. Now I see that sometime since that post a footnote has been included along with a mention of Allender in the text of Real Marriage (although with an error in grammar). See below for the before and after images:

This modification vindicates the concerns expressed at the time and is yet another indication that the statement from Tyndale House about plagiarism in Driscoll’s books was inadequate. For future reference, publishers can use this chart to find a substantial number of other corrections that should be made. For instance, Crossway publisher has yet to correct Driscoll’s use of Allender’s conceptualization in Death By Love.

 
 
 

Publisher Corrects More Plagiarism in Mark Driscoll’s Real Marriage

In January, I pointed out that a section of Real Marriage by Mark & Grace Driscoll seemed quite similar to a passage from Leland Ryken’s book Worldly Saints (as well as a couple of other sources). As it turns out, the publisher, Harper Collins Christian, has now corrected the section in question by quoting and footnoting the section of Ryken’s book I identified. Nearly all of the problems I identified have been addressed (although a couple of problems remain, see below) in the Google version of Real Marriage. See the earlier post for the details.

I have the entire section with before and after images side-by-side here. To illustrate, here is a short section from page 115 of Real Marriage (see this link for the entire two page section):

Unfortunately, the publisher did not correct the factual errors in this section. As I pointed out in my January post, it was probably Benedict who rolled in the thorns, not Jerome. The bigger problem is Driscoll’s misreading of the legend of Francis of Assisi. Driscoll’s version claims:

Saint Francis made women out of snow and then caressed them in order to quiet the lust that burned in him.

As I point out in another post, the legend of Francis and his snow family is an old one which, in the original, doesn’t sound like this R-rated version. Driscoll’s paraphrase departs significantly from his probable sources and from the original story. It is surprising that the publisher didn’t correct these factual problems along with adding the footnotes.

Harper Collins Christian continues to vindicate the allegations of plagiarism by quoting and footnoting the original sources. Tyndale, we’re looking at you now.