RTE.ie News does a copy and paste on Wii article
Tuesday, February 20th, 2007This is my second post bashing RTÉ.ie News in one day, but I think it’s only fair given the following discovery.
While googling for articles to back up my rant on a post over at TCAL.net, I spotted something interesting…
I used the search term “wii sales” and got the following results.
Just in case it has changed, here’s a screen cap (which highlights the interesting bit).
So RTÉ.ie and BBC News both used the exact same headline - odd. OK - let’s read the articles to see what’s going on.
BBC News first, and then RTÉ.ie News… notice anything repetitive about the two?
Again, I’ve linked to screen caps of the two articles (BBC News one here, RTÉ.ie one here), with the BBC News one highlighted in the areas also used, word for word, by RTÉ.ie News.
From where I’m standing, other than drop a few paragraphs and change ‘UK’ to ‘Irish’, it’s a clean copy and paste job (oh - they also dropped the reference to the retail price for the European launch, possibly because the BBC article only had the sterling amount and going to find the Euro figure was too much like hard work).
So, could the BBC have ripped off RTÉ.ie? No - the BBC published their story on the 28th of November, RTÉ’s came a day later.
Could it be that they’re both lazy and took it from a press release? Possibly - but it doesn’t read like a press release to me (no Nintendo press release would mention it’s rivals in the same way, nor would it start with ‘Nintendo says’, it would be more certain and assertive than that)… and even if it was - would you be happy with your state broadcaster copying press releases word for word?
So did RTÉ.ie rip off BBC News? Well, let’s look at it like this - RTÉ.ie used the same headline and the same text word for word, took away some paragraphs and added an Irish spin on things… and they did it all a day after the BBC piece was published. What do you think?
What can be said for certain, though, is that the RTÉ.ie article was not written by anyone in RTÉ.ie. It’s been copied from somewhere, BBC News, Nintendo press release or somewhere else… And if it’s a wire service, neither the BBC or RTÉ.ie have attributed it as such.
Sure - this is from a few months ago, but I think it’s pretty appalling that it’s happened at all. I’d expect this from the Evening Herald, not RTÉ.ie.
Blogs elsewhere
May 31st, 2009 at 12:46 am
Sure why not Bash RTE channel, everybody know’s there apart of the country rip off society, charging license fee’s for re-run shows?
Did ya know the evening show celeb’s accept sponsored driven cars by (BMW) to present the news and gossip.
Wanker’s the lot of them?
and Bias, all the way…
Hip,hip uray! wankers?