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Question of journalistic honesty
The article in your Friday, Feb. 19, 2016 issue on “Torres in DC to Attend Dinner with Obama” published as a press release from the Governor’s Office and may have been issued and made public by the Press Secretary.
The information in this press release, sad to say, consisted of protected written intellectual property that were copied verbatim out of a copyright and all rights reserved source of the National Governors Association mission statement. Whoever in the Governor’s Office that made this a public domain documented publication as if it was its own written undertaking may have committed plagiarism.
If this was the work of the Press Secretary of the Governor’s Office, it makes that office look very unprofessional and lacking respect and journalistic honesty of copyright intellectual materials that follows certain protocols when using in one’s public domain published information. The worst part in this article consisted of quotation in which the author made it appear as the governor’s statement when in fact it came verbatim from the source owned by the National Governor’s Association per its copyright protected written intellectual property.
For your information, the second sentence of the second paragraph, the entire fourth paragraph copied verbatim, and the entire fifth paragraph was problematic. The fifth paragraph appeared as a quote of the governor’s statement when it was not. This was no less accidental than peculiarly intentional to mask a message from its truthful purpose and public interest. The ambiguous and double talk nature of what the press release made it so obvious that the author may be fishing for words and tinkering thought he does not know about. Honesty is a question of right and wrong, not a matter of policy.
Francisco R. Agulto
Kanat Tabla
