At a time when
plagiarists masquerading as
journalists are ruling the roost in at least a few Asian
countries, it is necessary to look askance at everyone posing as a journalist unless he/she is an established one.
Worse still, when such plagiarists are
exposed to public obloquy, editors of very few other dailies have the intellectual/
professional integrity to put them in their place. Not long ago, there was the first case of the Editor of a leading English daily of India exposed for lifting an article from ''The Times'', London, and palming it off as his own, and with his own byline at that!
One small daily exposed the professional transgression and, consequently, he was sacked. But what riled other journalists in India was that no other English daily was willing to report a word of it! As a result, a consensus emerged among Indian journalists that Indian editors were thick as thieves! Politics may once have been, and may still be in many countries, the last resort of a scoundrel; but it looks as though not all Editors are are pure as driven snow.