Blogger Slugs Plagiarist
I just have to pass around this story. Nathan Kushner got an IM from Laura Pahl, a Lewis University student who wanted to pay him to write her paper on Hinduism. The story is well worth the five minutes it takes to read, but if you are lazy, the short version is that he wrote her paper, blogged about the experience, and then emailed the link to her dean.
On the one hand, she deserved it, its ironic, and its funny. On the other, Nate is using his power as a citizen journalist to strike at a young girl who is not a public figure. While public figures have always been fair game for the press, does that apply to private citizens? While I can report that Senator Madehimup likes to wear women’s clothes, it is both irresponsible and usually illegal to report that Mr. Fakeman next door does the same thing. Since Laura commited no crime, Nate may have broken the law by publicly “outing” her as a cheater. He was well within his rights to tell the dean, but its hardly within journalism standards to tell the world.
Lets be a little more honest though: Nate is no citizen journalist; he is a comedy writer, and this blog is on the site for “A Week of Kindness”, the sketch comedy group he is part of. So, assuming he is telling the truth and not just trying to be funny (as he likely is, since people have been claiming to call and harass Laura), he is acting less as a member of the press and more as a member of the public, albeit one who happens to have been BoingBoing’d and Waxy’d and MetaFilter’d all at once. This was by no means a private exchange, but a citizen posting damaging and defamatory information in a highly public place.
Lucky for Nate, it is basically impossible to win a case for libel based on true information. Still, journalism it ain’t. A far better comparison would be handing out flyers saying that Suzy slept with Lisa’s ex-boyfriend… to 50,000 people.
(via Google Blogoscoped)
It bears mentioning that Boing Boing is calling it an early April Fools hoax, although they won’t say on what authority. Even if it isn’t true, I think this is an issue that bears further discussion.
A lot of people insist this is a scam, hoax, April Fools joke, etc. Nate was just posting what happened. Nate’s no journalist, nor does he pretend to be one.
It’s possible to boil this down as a funny story that, against the odds, got spread around, that also happened to have profound implications for one girl who didn’t feel like writing her own paper.
Comment by Chris Coleman | March 30, 2005
And what if the whole thing was made up by the sister (say) of the “victim”, Laura? There is no proof that the person at the other end of the IM conversation was in fact Laura. And what if it was indeed the “real” Laura, just living out a fantasy, but with no actual intention to cheat? Once the story gets onto Google, it will be very difficult to remove it.
Comment by James | March 30, 2005