Monday, March 5, 2007

"there is no true excuse"

For the past several years, I've been on the brink of cancelling my decades-long subscription to The Globe, largely based on the continual decline in quality of sports coverage. The latest from Ron Borges has now pushed me over the brink. It's one thing to be clearly biased, it's yet another to be a plagerizer, and that's what Mr. Borges is.

He can come up with all the excuses he wants, but at reputable publications there is no true excuse for Mr. Borges literally cutting and pasting another writer's work without attribution, and you all know this to be true. Ron Borges should be fired, but I expect he will not be, and I will become what I never believed possible: A Herald subscriber.

You owe it to your readers to take corrective action.

Kevin Fitzgerald
Medfield, MA

2 comments:

Chris said...

Last year, some Juanita called me at home asking if I'd like to subscribe to the Globe. Rather than hang up, I cut her off at the pass, explaining that I don't want a mountain of newsprint to bring to the dump (where it ought to go in the first place, but that's another story). I also told her that today's newspaper does a wonderful job telling me yesterday's news. Then I told her that the delivery person comes to our home after I leave for work, making their 'news' at least ten hours more stale than it already is.

So Juanita looks at her 'script,' and, without missing a beat, asks me, "So, what about all the great coupons you'll be missing?" It was not, 'So, what about the great works of Shaughnessy and Borges and all our other writers and columnists?" No. The script told her to push the coupons.

Borges isn't even worth five cents off my next purchase of a Twix bar.

The 'old media' rues the day that the 'new media' came along (thank you, Algore). I'm thrilled the new sheriff has just about pummeled the old one into dust, and there's not a thing that they can do about it. Hillary Clinton goes and mimics a southern drawl at a church service (the chameleon that she is) and immediately it's on The Drudge Report. I love it!

Anonymous said...

Pretty tough. Martin Baron is the Globe's Dean Wormer. "The time has come for someone to put his foot down. And that foot is me!

What's next double secrete probation?