Oh dear. The Observer‘s chief political correspondent, Andrew Rawnsley, has been accused by Paul Staines of writing a piece that looks worryingly similar to something that ran in the Economist.
Of course, Rawnsley is not the first journalist to be accused of passing of other people’s work as his own (at the time of publication, he has not responded to Staines’s allegations). Older people who I talk to in the industry say it’s a very rare thing to happen – and when it does, it’s usually an exhausted young graduate trainee who doesn’t know any better. In my opinion, it happens all the time, it’s just that people don’t get caught very often. Johann Hari is the classic example – the only absolutely rock solid piece of plagiarism that could be pinned on him was a piece from a German newspaper article that he’d translated.
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