The Boston Globe, Ron Borges, and the Art of Stupidity

Before I get into this, I'd just like to direct everyone's attention to a hilarious posting on the geniusly named blog "Kissing Suzy Kolber." A sample is to the right. The rest can be found here.

Ok. So, I've been wanting to write about the Ron Borges incident for a few weeks now but didn't really have the time to sit down and give it adequate thought. After having done so, I'd like to address it.

For those unaware, the veteran writer Borges was caught "plagiarizing" (more later on why that is in quotes) after a reader of the website Cold, Hard Football Facts noticed that parts of his Sunday "Football Notes" column in the Boston Globe were lifted, word-for-word, from an article published in the Tacoma News Tribune a week earlier. One example:

From Mike Sando's article about Darrell Jackson, published Feb. 25
"Jackson was leading the NFL in touchdowns last season when a turf-toe injury forced him to miss the final three games. The injury prevented Jackson from achieving his third 1,000-yard season in four years and the fourth overall.

Jackson still led the Seahawks with 63 catches for 956 yards and 10 touchdowns."

From Ron Borges' "Football Notes," published March 4
"Jackson was leading the NFL in touchdowns last season when a turf-toe injury forced him to miss the final three games. The injury prevented him from reaching his third 1,000-yard season in four years, but Jackson still led Seattle with 63 catches for 956 yards and 10 touchdowns."

So there ya go. The reading public became outraged and by the next day, the Globe had suspended Borges for two months without pay. Was this the right move? The average person would say yes, of course. But the average person doesn't know how a notes column works. Many writers subscribe to sport wires, from which they can take pieces of information gathered by other journalists around the country and use the material for their own articles. This has been going on for years with little to no controversy arising. Personally, I think this diminishes the quality of a newspaper's sports section and encourages writers to be less and less creative. Why go out and get your own material when you can just take bits and pieces of other people's reporting and essentially pass it off as your own, right? Journalists think that adding the "information from other sources was used in this report" will safeguard them. As the Borges case demonstrated, it will not. At least, not when you use the information AND the writer's exact phrasing.

To me, the Globe had two options here: suspend Borges OR take away his notes column but keep him on staff. With the latter, they would of course have to release a statement explaining how the wires and notes columns work or else risk coming off soft and unethical. The reality is, Borges has become one of the few remaining icons at the Globe (for better or worse) and people read the paper to see what he has to say. Taking him off the staff is a dumb move, especially when, in Borges' eyes, he did nothing wrong. So, assign him to a high school sports beat for a while and stress the importance of creativity and originality. My problem with what the Globe actually did was the editors seemed a little too quick to get rid of him. Perhaps it was to improve their own image, come off as the virtuous and strong newspaper organization that's combatting plagiarism one corrupt journalist at a time. But in the process, they refused to stand by one of their veteran reporters and now appear disloyal (at least to me). Maybe the Globe’s actions proved satisfactory to readers, but what journalist will want to work for a paper that won't come to the aid of its staff members? When it comes down to it, Borges is not the only one who screwed up.

It's a distressing story. In an era when print journalism is on the decline, scandals like this are less than desirable. Maybe Ron Borges did not think he was doing anything wrong by publishing those excerpts. In reality, he was. He was being lazy and stupid. A veteran journalist at one of the most prestigious newspapers in the country should have the experience and intelligence to know better and strive for a higher level of excellence.