Media only tells one side of "Plagiarism on the Campaign Trail"

Recently Hillary Clinton accused Barack Obama of plagiarism for an ad-lib speech in which he repeated the words of one of his close friends and colleagues. All the media outlets are picking it up and running with it, but did they do any legwork to see if perhaps Hillary is a hypocrite?

Clinton is also guilty of plagiarizing Rudy Giuliani when she said, “I’m tested. I’m ready. Let’s make it happen,” in El Paso and of plagiarizing Obama himself when she said, "We are fired up and we are ready to go because we know America is ready for change and the process starts right here in Iowa.”

Now, instead of repeating Clinton's accusation, a good journalist would do a little bit of fact-checking and take Clinton to task on her own plagiarism.

Last night I began to gather a list of which publications just repeated what the Clinton Camp said and the ones that actually did homework and actually deserve the title of journalist (at least in the context of reporting this story), but there were far too many that fit into the first category and it grew tiresome.

One surprise is that Fox News was actually reporting both sides, which was refreshing... I guess it makes sense that they would report on something that can later be used as fodder for promoting McCain.

On another note, I'm currently talking with an LA Times writer who's column was one of the first to get me upset about this, so maybe I'll talk about that next, when I'm done corresponding with him.