The Washington Examiner offered a lengthy apology over the weekend after a story about missing Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi included several unattributed full paragraphs of a different New York Times piece.
“The Washington Examiner apologizes for inadvertently including paragraphs from a New York Times story in an Examiner story about Jared Kushner and Saudi Arabia,” said the paper’s managing editor Toby Harnden in a statement now appearing at the top of the piece “Khashoggi crisis is a reckoning for Jared Kushner.”
Harnden went on to explain that he had included the Times bits in a note on the unpublished version of the piece, but that things went awry from there.
“The note was not clear,” Harnden continued. “The reporter thought I had rewritten part of his story. The material from the New York Times was then subsequently mistakenly published in error and without any attribution.”
Harnden did not immediately respond to request for comment from TheWrap.
The snafu was first spotted by MSNBC anchor David Gura — who provided a series of devastating side-by-side screengrabs in a Twitter thread Sunday.
“Am I the first to spot this egregious plagiarism in the @dcexaminer,” he asked — tagging reporter Joel Gehrke for good measure.
https://twitter.com/davidgura/status/1051415376058351617
— David Gura (@davidgura) October 14, 2018
— David Gura (@davidgura) October 14, 2018
— David Gura (@davidgura) October 14, 2018
— David Gura (@davidgura) October 14, 2018