St. Maarten – We do not make a habit of criticizing other media outlets, mainly because we think that everybody is entitled to make his or her own mistakes. But when an internet site with a history of poor judgment in terms of ethical journalistic behavior accuses one of our editors of plagiarism, we will not remain silent.
Plagiarism is, of course, looked down upon. Copyrighted material is protected under the law in many countries. It is unclear how this is regulated in St. Maarten. After the constitutional change, the bureau for intellectual properties in Curacao handled IP-rights for the island for a period of one year, but after this year passed, no local bureau has been set up.
Legislation or not, stealing somebody else’s work is not okay with us. We’re also not okay with web sites that publish slanderous statements about this newspaper.
This is exactly what SMN Network did when it wrote earlier this week under a headline that even slaughtered the web site’s own name along with our editor’s name: “SMN News plagiarized by Newspapers – Today Newspaper’s Donellis Brown not to be trusted.”
The web site’s correct name is SMN Network (SMN being an abbreviation of St. Maarten News) and the name of our editor is really Donellis Browne.
The author of the piece, Bibi Shaw, saw red when an article in Monday’s newspaper about the letter by Governor Holiday to Parliament President Gracita Arrindell failed to mention that the letter was first published on SMN Network. This was an honest mistake and we had no problem correcting this the following day (under the headline Clarification on page 3). That’s how we correct our mistakes and oversights.
Shaw however, went ballistic. She sent emails to the administrator of our web site that gave the impression they had been written by a psychiatric patient with multiple personality disorder. On the web site, Shaw accused this newspaper, as the headline indicates, of plagiarism.
We don’t know which dictionary Shaw uses, or if she possesses one to begin with, but plagiarism is the act of verbatim copying text that has been written by someone else without mentioning the source.
Donellis Browne did not do that. Like any good journalist, he monitors all possible news sources, including SMN Network. When Shaw published the letter it became a public document. Everybody could read it, print it, copy it, or ignore it.
Browne contacted the President of Parliament, Gracita Arrindell, for a comment, and wrote his own story. That’s journalism 101.
What is in our book also journalism 101 is that we do not identify suspects of crimes by their full name, that we do not publish pictures of these suspects in a way that they are recognizable, and that, unlike SMN Network, we do not publish gossip as the God given truth after every murder and robbery.
It is true that Browne contacted Shaw about the letter and that he promised her to give her site credit for it – and then he forgot. That’s not good, but it is not the end of the world either. We corrected the mistake and, unlike SMN Network, we intend to maintain our professional standards.
SOURCE HILBERT HAAR
