Poor Larissa. She’s long been the lefty light of our life, the fire of our loins. La-ri-ssa: tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to sizzle, at three, on the teeth. La! Ri! Sa! So we were heartbroken when we discovered that scarcely a week after her site, Raw Story, was plagiarized by the AP, mainstream media has done it again!

This time, it’s the Wall Street Journal who has ripped off Raw Story. In an article posted in January, Jason Leopold of Raw Story wrote about Michael Scanlon and former fiancee Emily Miller. TalkLeft has an email summary by Jason…

Three months ago, I broke a big story in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. I reported that Abramoff’s ex-partner Michael Scanlon was implicated in the scandal by his jilted lover and former fiancee, Emily Miller, who met Scanlon when the two worked as press aides for Congressman Tom DeLay. I spent four months fleshing out this story. I spoke to a dozen people in Washington who told me how this went down. In the end, I discovered that Miller spoke to the FBI after Scanlon broke off their engagement and started dating another woman. It was an important story. It had all the makings of a Hollywood thriller. My story was published on the Internet magazine, Raw Story. It received some play on the Net and in indpendent media circles. Some mainstream publication reporters acknowledged the good work in private emails to my editor, John Byrne. However, it was never picked up or republished by any of the traditional publications.

Today, the Wall Street Journal published a front-page “exclusive” that basically recycled my story from January without mentioning that it was first reported by me or that I broke the story wide open. I spoke to two Journal editors in New York. They acknowledged this morning that they read my story and assigned a reporter to follow it up. But they refuse to credit me for first reporting it.

Scummy, but who’s surprised? We’re just amazed that two major mainstream media news sources would plagiarize Raw Story in the same week.

WSJ Fails to Credit Online Reporter Who Broke Story [Talk Left]
Related: More on AP Blog Plagiarism: “We Only Credit Blogs We Know”
Related: AP Journalists Plagiarize Blogger

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