Plagiarism: The Unforgivable Face of Nigerian Journalism

Update - Later

I eventually received an apology in the evening – [The Apology Blog]

Update

At first, I gave the Nigerian Telegraph the benefit of the doubt thinking my blog was plagiarised by someone writing for them, but now I have found the story Culture of Impunity published by the Editor without attribution. This is unacceptable. The rest of the article is as originally written apart from a new graphic at the end of this blog.

Reading me elsewhere

I would not know if it was a pang of conscience of the writer or the eagle-eyed editorial team of the Nigerian Telegraph that decided to pull a story titled Culture of Impunity written by one Chidi Okoye, but I have evidence than my material has been plagiarised.

Yesterday, I wrote a blog titled, #StellaGate: Do The Needful song, this morning going through my news feeds of Nigerian newspapers, I happened upon the ‘Culture of Impunity’ article, and I could see my words jump back at me and I know I never syndicated my piece nor gave anyone permission to use it.

This is plagiarism

I followed the link and found it was dead, at least to check if any attributions, acknowledgements or references were made to the source material on my blog, but I could find no such link. I can safely assume this was blatant plagiarism.

Google Search defines Plagiarism as “the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.”

To prove my point, I searched for a section of text on Google and it did present the fact that the text had appeared on Nigerian Telegraph and this at least five hours before my search according to my newsreader.

The evidence

This is what I searched for, “After numberless claims and counterclaims from many government agencies with none of the at least five stories lining up” and much I have had issues with Nigerian journalism, this is no doubt a new low and a low blow, a real shame indeed.

I will let the graphics attached do the talking.

This is from my Feedly newsreader where I discovered at the end of the first paragraph that the text looked familiar. It was written by Chidi Okoye for the Nigerian Telegraph.

This proves that the text fragment that I searched for with its unique phraseology and punctuation did appear on the Nigerian Telegraph website. Mine at least 17 hours before this, if we compare timings on my newsreader and this result from Google.

Do the needful

The graphic below shows the sections edited or lifted directly from my blog. I am first embarrassed for The Nigerian Telegraph, a new news media outfit that I have followed from their inception, and I expect an apology from them for this unfortunate incident.

The page on the Nigerian Telegraph with URL and authored by the Editor.