Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Plagiarism: where'd you get your video, Rachel Maddow?

Recently, part-time antiplagiarism activist Rachel Maddow excoriated Rand Paul for lifting uncredited sections of Wikipedia in a speech. Maddow has indignantly spoken out against the practice before (here at 1:36.)
     Problem is, her show can hardly afford to be holier-than-thou. Below is what was visited on a videographer during Occupy protests covered by The Rachel Maddow Show:



Later the MSNBC show made nice with Peter Brauer in its blog, but the program didn't stop its practice.
     Below is a screen cap from twelve seconds of clips from an AKSARBENT YouTube video used by The Rachel Maddow Show (at the 1:13 mark here), all of which were cropped to hide the AKSARBENT bug at the lower right of the frame (at the 1:11 mark here.)
     In other words, in our case, The Rachel Maddow Show engaged in (legal) plagiarism of AKSARBENT when it would have been easier not to do so.
     We like Rachel Maddow here at AKSARBENT and often embed videos from her show, but sheesh — lay off the accusations until whoever it is on your staff who assembles video clips starts walking the walk.
     UPDATE: We saw Nebraska State Senator Ken Haar on Maddow discussing a proposed climate change study and the sabotage thereof by the Nebraska GOP and noticed that the Maddow show now is meticulously tagging the YouTube videos it appropriates. Good. 



Compare and contrast: When CNN used AKSARBENT video, it didn't attempt to obscure our bug; in fact it added another credit showing where it got the clip. (It also cleaned up our rather dreary audio — thanks, CNN!)

1 comment:

  1. I'm curious if Aksarbent ever had any MSNBC or Rachal Maddow staff respond to this.

    I'm glad you called people out on this even though a great deal of the time Maddow and Aksarbent are on the same page about issues.

    ReplyDelete

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