AP = Admitting Plagiarizing?

L'Ombre de l'Olivier blogged This is an amazing tale (H/t Majikthise). It seems that when the AP is caught cutting and pasting huge chunks of blogger original research into its own story on the same subject the response is "we do not credit blogs":

Then don't copy material from blogs.

We contacted an AP senior editor and ombudsmen both and both admitted to having had the article passed on to them, and both stated that they viewed us as a blog and because we were a blog, they did not need to credit us. What we are or are not is frankly irrelevant. What is relevant is that by using a term like blog to somehow excuse plagiarism, the mainstream press continues to lower the bar for acceptable behavior. It need not matter where the AP got the information, research, and actual wording from. What matters is that if they use it in part or in whole, they must attribute properly.

If you copy from one source, it is plagerism. If you copy from multiple sources, it is research. But you still must identify where you got the information.

A blog or a small press publication or grads students working in the corner of a library all equally deserve credit for their work, period.

Absolutely.

Unfortunately this is far too common and has happened to me and to other writers and bloggers far too frequently. This time, however, we made a point of tape recording the AP apparatchiks admitting to taking our work and using it without attribution, stating "we do not credit blogs".