Thieves and Liars
What are the chances that if someone asked you a question you would give exactly the same answer, word for word, that you gave someone who asked that question earlier in the evening? I remember a rival newspaper wanted everyone to believe just that. Not only were the words exactly the same but the punctuation was duplicated. Most people don't speak punctuation marks out loud and there can be some flexibility in where, say, the commas go. Now, if the quotes were given to the two reporters involved, perhaps at a press conference, then the words would be same. But not when two reporters are operating completely independently. Less conclusive but a red flag is when all the facts of the story are recounted in exactly the same order. Slightly different words. It's called rewriting. It's called plagiarism. It's called theft. In Canada all the newspapers used to be members of a news cooperative called the Canadian Press. In places where there are competing media outlets, the stories submitted to the cooperative are not distributed to the local competition. But the unscrupulous scum newspaper chains who also own an outlet in Calgary simply pass the story onto their sister publication in Edmonton. A smart operator would then use the information as the basis of their own story but do all their own news gathering. It takes a real couple of stupid scum just to steal the story outright. Probably more than one person in the newsroom was involved, at least one editor and possibly a reporter, so we're not talking about a single rogue operator. Not like the guy from the same paper who used to pretend to work for us when he phoned bereaved relatives. At first I thought people, often in times of crisis and grief, were just confused when they said they'd just spoken to us. Then I noticed that every time this happened it was the same rival reporter's name on the story next morning. And when he left our competitor 's employment people stopped saying they'd already spoken to us.