Strib editorial page kinda fesses up in plagarism beef

It's no secret that Scott Johnson, one of the troika of heavy breathers behind the popular right wing blog Powerline, spends an inordinate amount of his time hatin' on the Star Tribune. On Saturday, for instance, Johnson cobbled together a post making the argument that the Strib is "the nation's worst newspaper." No matter how dim a view one takes of the Newspaper of the Twin Cities, that is a plainly silly claim. In the same post, however, Johnson did make one point for which he deserves credit: He exposed the Strib's uncredited appropriation of the prose of The New Yorker's Talk of the Town columnist Hendrik Hertzberg.

Today, Susan Albright, editor of the Strib's editorial page, finally addressed the matter, which stems from a November 10 editorial entitled "Americans Need Their Congress Back." Writes Albright:

To correct the record, the following should have been attributed to Hertzberg: the phrases "festival of bribery" and "the subcontracting of environmental, energy, labor, and health-care policymaking to corporate interests; ... efforts to suppress scientific truth," as well as a phrase that was paraphrased, "a set of economic and fiscal policies that have slowed growth, spurred inequality, replenished the ranks of the poor and uninsured, and exacerbated the insecurities of the middle class."

According to Albright note, the failure to properly attribute was unintentional. Evidently, that was the rationale for not identifying the offending writer by name.