Thursday, June 16, 2011

Abante: Plagiarism Fail!

.:Plagiarism Fail:.

While reading some Tweets this afternoon, I noticed a pretty funny one from one of the people I follow, Tania Arpa…


That sounds funny. I must investigate.


And investigate, I did. I already knew about the Filipino Freethinkers article in question, as it was one of those uber-subtle satires where you had to really double check to determine if it were a joke or not. It’s either that, or the CBCP is so crazy nowadays, that a proposal so outlandish doesn’t seem very unlikely anymore, but that’s beside the point.

What amused me at first was upon checking the Abante article, it was obvious that whoever wrote the article took the satire seriously. It’s an almost excusable mistake, assuming you don’t look at the tags on the original article, which clearly labels it as a satire.

Unfortunately, fridge logic kicked in a few moments later when I realized that, after skimming through the article some more, no credit at all was given to Filipino Freethinkers. The mainstream media has plagiarized a “nameless blogger” yet again!

Given my personal history, I’m extra touchy about plagiarism than most other people, so this glaring omission from Abante made me raise an eyebrow.


Pictured: me. Raising an eyebrow.

So if I showed you now a couple of scans from the original article and then from the ripoff, I suppose you can judge for yourself if this was an outright ripoff, right? I mean, seriously. Any idiot could tell that this was plagiarism, seeing how Technogra.ph saw it, too (I keed, I keed. I love Ricowums!).


Could’ve fooled me as real, unfortunately.

After seeing that, compare it to the first part of Abante’s “news” article…


Why didn’t we credit Filipino Freethinkers? Because screw those godless heathens, that’s why!

It’s sad enough that you plagiarized an article from a blog without giving them a single ounce of credit. What makes this steaming pile of fail even worse is that you plagiarized a parody article and passed it off as news. That’s just depressingly pathetic.

Here’s a bit of unsolicited advice to you, dear Abante: fire your fact-checkers. Clearly, they’re not doing their job. At all.

4 comments:

OneTamad said...

Poe's Law, isn't it?

"Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing."

Strange though, that they didn't cite how they got the story. These things usually have "...in a press statement" or "...in an interview", etc.

Kel Fabie said...

Yup. Poe's Law. It never gets old, especially when coupled with good old plagiarism.

Anonymous said...

..how about satire fail??

Kel Fabie said...

@Anon: based on what standards do we say the FF satire fails? I don't see it.