As the "Newspaper of Record" sinks slowly in the East, the Baltimore Sun stays reasonably straight.
As always, "In Baltimore, the Sun will be out tomorrow."
From a WBAL.com AP article, Olesker Out :
Olesker Out [/] Wednesday, January 04, 2006 [/] The Associated Press
A longtime columnist for The Baltimore Sun resigned Tuesday amid allegations of plagiarism from other newspapers, The Sun said early Wednesday. [/] Michael Olesker, who wrote a column that appeared twice a week in the Maryland section of The Sun for 27 years, quit two weeks before his 30th anniversary as a Baltimore columnist. His most recent column had appeared in Tuesday's Sun. [/] "I made mistakes," Olesker said as he cleaned out his desk in the newsroom, according to an article in The Sun's editions published Wednesday. [/] "I am sorry to say that in the course of doing those columns, I unintentionally screwed up a handful of paragraphs. I am embarrassed by my sloppiness," The Sun quoted the columnist as saying. [/] Neither Olesker nor Sun editor Timothy Franklin could be reached for comment by The Associated Press early Wednesday.
The newspaper's story quoted Franklin as saying, "Clearly, this is a practice that's unacceptable, and we acted quickly to meet with Mike and try to resolve it. It's been excruciatingly painful."
Olesker and Sun political editor David Nitkin are central figures in a First Amendment lawsuit the newspaper has filed against Governor Ehrlich. [/] In November 2004, Ehrlich issued an order prohibiting state executive branch employees from speaking with Olesker and Nitkin. The ban was imposed after Nitkin disclosed a state proposal to sell preserved forestland in St. Mary's County to a politically connected construction company owner.
[…] The most recent allegations against Olesker came Tuesday in an e-mail from Gadi Dechter, a media reporter at the Baltimore City Paper, an alternative weekly, to Sun City Editor Howard Libit. [/] Dechter said he and a research assistant had reviewed Olesker's columns during the past two years and found instances in which the columnist had apparently used the work of journalists at The New York Times and The Washington Post without attribution. Dechter found Olesker's columns included work of Sun colleagues, as well. [/] Dechter's research was prompted by a correction in The Sun on December 24 in which the paper said that a paragraph from a December 12 column by Olesker about former U.S. Sen. Max Cleland was almost identical to several lines in a 2003 profile of the senator by Peter Carlson of The Post.
The Sun then began a review of Olesker's work, which was under way when he resigned. [My ellipses and emphasis]
