Sunday, August 30, 2015

Norwegian journalist caught plagiarizing

The Norwegian daily newspaper Dagens Næringsliv has admitted to having published a story that was plagiarized from The New Yorker and included fabricated quotations (documentation of some excerpts here [norw./engl.]). They have removed the article in question from the Internet. Reports on the case have been published by DagbladetNRK, Journalisten, and other media. The story broke when a Norwegian journalist, Øistein Refseth, twittered about the similarities in the two stories.

The journalist who submitted the piece about people's anger when flying, Daniel G. Butenschøn, is a well-known writer in Norway and was the assistant director of SKUP  (Stiftelsen for en Kritisk og Undersøkende Presse, Foundation for Critical and Investigative Journalism). Butenschøn has now resigned from his position at SKUP and has quit his job at Dagens Næringsliv.

This is not the first time that he was found to have plagiarized, people have been combing through his past publications. It seems he was already on his second chance, having plagiarized a piece on Hong Kong as a free-lancer writing for Morgenbladet, for which he was reprimanded. 

The journalism site Journalisten has a number of articles that link the various press reports and a long list of previous plagiarism scandals in journalism in Norway.