"The New Plagiarism" is the plague of the sense of entitlement.

If you are able to duplicate someone else's work, does it become yours? Schools teach us no; we could be expelled. Fair enough.

If you make minor edits to someone else's work, does it become yours? Apparently so. The author's experience tells us that we can certainly make the claim that the piece is "public", and that annecdotes were "borrowed", but only borrowed as much from the original as it borrowed from everyone else.

We live in a society where the gatherer becomes the discoverer, the sponsor becomes the artist, and the investors become the founders. If they've had a finger in that pie, it's their pie.

Is this not another sign of our society's bloated sense of entitlement and ingratitude?

This also illustrates how difficult it can be to judge the validity of information on the internet. Information is getting distorted and twisted in a complex game of chinese telephone, and defining authority and truth are left largely to Google. How often do you check other pages after you find an answer on Google (especially if its a Wikipedia page)?

This article also shows just where we (non-journalists) stand on the food chain compared to those with direct access to the mass media machines. We are nothing. There is no mechanism whereby a blogger can force an establishment journalist to give credit where credit is due. The legal system will not help you. Sue, and you will be fought vigorously, and exhaust whatever meager savings you might have on legal fees - with no guarantee of a win.

They have the real power and they know it. If you, an outsider, have some insight which the mainstream press considers valuable (a great rarity!), it will be stolen and attributed to a "respectable" figure. And there won't be a thing you can do about it.

i can't tell how much of what you wrote is intended as hyperbole, but assuming you were straightforward in your intent, i believe you're overreaching. it isn't easy for outsiders to break into the mainstream media, but it happens.

recent examples of this would be nate silver and rachel maddow, but there are plenty more.

I don't think any external observer would try to argue that this wasn't plagiarism. The newspaper just has a vested interest in defending itself from such a serious accusation.

Not asking permission or evening linking to a source for your information is, at least, a discoverable faux pas which can easily lead to some nasty public backlash. If the internet had no memory whatsoever (caches, search engines, archive.org, etc.) then I can only imagine the insane plagiarism that would follow.

The point isn't that we need to know who came up with what, it's that we need to know the justification for their assertion.

If it becomes common knowledge that "the Republican party lost their way after 2000", people will stop backing up the statement. As time goes on, nobody will know why "Republicans lost their way after 2000". In the future, careful historians will want to know who first made the assertion so that they can understand where this general knowledge came from.

I get it--as it gets impossible to find out who came up with what, content creators are an indirect casualty but historians are a direct one because that's their actual job! That's sort of funny. I guess they'll have to use fancy statistical analysis like everyone else now.

Well, historians work with primary and secondary sources. The internet collectively hoards and archives insane amounts of information, so it's a lot to dig through, but sources are often still there somewhere, and they are often copied verbatim.

A big part of history has always been gathering and interpreting sources, to figure out the validity of assertions like that (whether contemporary or retroactive). Hearsay and speculation are nothing new. As the article notes, history isn't about reciting names and dates, it's about making a case to support or refute an interpretation of what happened, based on available evidence.