FOI story tip: Find government plagiarism through Google
Here's a great tip for finding plagiarism within government: Put quoted passages in Google from government reports to find plagiarism by our leaders. I never thought of this as a story idea until I saw the June 11
story by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Reporters Alan Judd and Andy Miller wrote that a state mental health commission report lifted verbatim phrases from a Michigan study published in 2004. The story came from a tipster, but I figure journalists could find similar plagiarism on their own by simply Googling passages in quotes. That's what I do to spot students plagiarizing stories (and, unfortunately, I catch one or two a semester and give them an automatic F for the course). It's not corruption, stealing money, or starting a war, but cheating is cheating, and if my students fail their courses for plagiarism, then it's worth checking on our public officials.