RIP-AND-READ — AND RIPPED OFF Illinois Times has grown
accustomed to scoops: The scapegoating of police officer Renatta Frazier. Phony war-hero
claims by Joe Wilkins, who was a Democratic Party bigshot until this newspaper
revealed that he didn’t have the medals he’d claimed. When you break news no one else has, some local
television and radio stations routinely report it with scant, if any,
attribution. In the business, it’s called rip-and-read, and
it’s an accepted practice — so long as it doesn’t go too
far. Last week, WICS-TV (Channel 20) went too far. At the beginning of the second segment of last
Friday’s news broadcast, anchor Jerry
Lambert began a segment on an upcoming
Land of Lincoln Goodwill Industries auction by rattling off a list of stuff
that was up for sale on June 3. We’d heard it before — we wrote
it. Of the hundreds of items that are up for sale,
Lambert mentioned only those that were listed at the beginning of an Illinois Times story
published the day before. And he used the exact same words, right down to
“a gumball machine from the 1920s” to “enough musical
instruments to supply an entire band.” We’ll give the station
some credit, though: “Russo-Japanese War” was changed to
“war between Russia and Japan” in describing a set of
collectible plates that are going on the auction block. That wasn’t all. When we went to the
station’s Web site, we found an online version of the story under the
headline “Hupperware” — the exact headline we used.
It’s a made-up word, a play on the last name of the charity’s
former executive director, which, amazingly, wasn’t mentioned
anywhere in the station’s piece, rendering the pun incomprehensible. News director David
Christopher says Lambert authored the
on-air piece. As for the online story, Christopher pulled the first
version from the Web site after we called. “Hupperware,” he
said, was so clever that it’s almost a household word in these parts.
By afternoon, a rewritten piece had been posted on the Web site. In
addition to carrying a new headline, the new version no longer listed the
gumball machine and musical instruments; instead, globes, a radio, and
other examples of stuff for sale that we didn’t have in our story
were listed. Although we requested it, we did not get an on-air
acknowledgment of the plagiarism in Friday’s newscast, nor did we
receive an apology. We did get a correction on the Web site acknowledging
the station had used the word “Hupperware” and that an Illinois Times writer
“claims he originated the term ‘Hupperware.’”
Claims? Come on, David. Name one — just one
— instance in the history of the world in which anyone anywhere has
used the word before we did. Look at the tape of Friday’s newscast.
Listen to Lambert with a copy of our story in your hands. With a straight
face, tell us this isn’t a case of plagiarism. It’d be nice to hear Lambert’s version of
events. Lambert — our newspaper’s “Best TV
Journalist” in 2005 [“Best of Springfield,” Sept. 15]
— didn’t return a telephone call. GIVING CREDIT WHERE NONE IS DUE Sometimes the big dogs steal our best stories, but
they’re apparently happy to share credit when it’s more
accurately called blame. Last Friday, in a story documenting U.S. District
Judge Byron Cudmore’s frustration with the release of various salacious
documents in the soap opera officially known as Rickey Davis et al. v. the City of Springfield, the State Journal-Register reported that both the SJ-R and Illinois Times had “obtained and published” the depositions
of Mayor Tim Davlin, former mayoral chief of staff Letitia
Dewith-Anderson, and Deputy Chief Rob Williams of the
Springfield Police Department. But IT obtained only Williams’ deposition, and even that
took a lot of cajoling. The Davlin and Dewith-Anderson depositions were
delivered exclusively to the SJ-R.
This article appears in Jun 1-7, 2006.
