Journalistic standards at the Jerusalem Post

Take a look at the article on Tu B'Av (which is today) in Wikipedia.

Then take a look at this article by Yonatan Sredni (well, not really) in today's Jerusalem Post. [Cached version available here.] (The identical article also appears here on Arutz-7.)

Lazy kids in elementary school sometimes get caught doing this sort of thing on their homework, but one might have expected somewhat higher ethical standards from a professional newspaper. Apparently, that would have been expecting too much...

The funniest part of all: In the byline, Sredni is billed as having "an MA in creative writing from Bar-Ilan University". That's rich.


UPDATE: In case you thought this might have been nothing more than a momentary lapse of editorial professionalism by the Jerusalem Post: A couple minutes of googling shows that the Post — and Arutz-7 — have been publishing articles that Sredni has plagiarized from Wikipedia for some time now. A few examples:

On Lag B'Omer:

• Wikipedia article
• Jerusalem Post article

On Shavuot:

• Wikipedia article
• Jerusalem Post article
• Arutz-7 article

On Yom Yerushalayim:

• Wikipedia article
• Jerusalem Post article
• Arutz-7 article

On the 17th of Tammuz:

• Wikipedia article
• Arutz-7 article

A pretty sad commentary on the editorial standards of the the Post and Arutz-7.


UPDATE: Not long after I wrote this post, the JPost took down Yonatan Sredni's Tu B'Av article. You can see a cached version of it here, however. The other plagiarized articles that I listed are still up (as of this writing.)

Arutz-7, meanwhile, has not taken down any of the plagiarized articles. Furthermore, they blocked publication of the comments I posted pointing out that the articles were plagiarized.


UPDATE: I was asked (quite legitimately) by a commenter if we can be certain that Sredni indeed plagiarized, since it is theoretically possible that he authored the Wikipedia articles in question. The first answer is that I ruled this out by checking the history pages for the Wikipedia articles, and saw that the various sections in question were authored by different users.

But if there remained any doubt, it was removed after a reader wrote a talkback on Sredni's Tu B'Av article, pointing out that much of the text was lifted directly from Wikipedia. Sredni replied to this in a talkback of his own, openly admitting that he copied from Wikipedia -- and arguing that this was actually OK, since he wrote the remainder of his article all by himself. (Yes, really. Follow the links to see for yourself.)


UPDATE: An additional note: As noted above, the Jerusalem Post has taken down Sredni's most recent copy-and-paste job (the Tu B'Av article). Amazingly, however, they have allowed all his other plagiarized articles (see the list above for a bunch that I found) to remain up on their website, unmodified. There can hardly be a louder confirmation than this of the Post's lack of editorial professionalism — and its lack of shame.

Even worse is Arutz-7. They have not removed the Tu B'Av article, or any of the others. They are fully aware of the fact that those articles are plagiarized — because I posted two comments saying so, in which I provided the links to the Wikipedia articles that Sredni copied from. Their reaction to this was not to remove any of the plagiarized articles (even the current one), nor was it to modify them with appropriate statements of attribution. Instead, they chose to respond to my comments by censoring them, so that no one should see them.

Shame on Arutz-7, and shame on the Jerusalem Post.


Wherever I am, my blog turns towards Eretz Yisrael טובה הארץ מאד מאד